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The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#231

Post by corimaith »

PaulHoule wrote: post #77
somenameforme wrote: post #17

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…

In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing a…

Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#232

Post by zamadatix »

rightbyte wrote: post #215
zamadatix wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you bring up 4:3 as a bad property? Honestly I find watching 4:3 easier on the eyes and mind since you know where to look.

It's less about whether one considers option A better than option B and more about whether the movie was shot for one option or "edited down" (pan and scan) to TV. If cinemas of the 90s had been 4:3 and TVs of the time 16:9, requiring crops to fill the screen properly, I'd have made the opposite statement.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#233

Post by idoubtit »

somenameforme wrote: post #17

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…

> Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.

Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).

"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#234

Post by ajsnigrutin »

somenameforme wrote: post #17

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…

Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...

It's still not the same as the cinema experience.

But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.

Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#235

Post by AStonesThrow »

mjd wrote: post #182
BurningFrog wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome. And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to some…

[dead]

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#236

Post by ks2048 »

isk517 wrote: post #165
somenameforme wrote: post #17

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…

A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

> because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#237

Post by parodysbird »

dfxm12 wrote: post #95

I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe. This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the sa…

> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator

That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#238

Post by boscillator »

Barrin92 wrote: post #164
buildingsramen wrote: post #130

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…

I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#239

Post by bityard »

somenameforme wrote: post #17

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…

I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.

It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.

Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.

So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#240

Post by whycome »

Here’s the thing. For all the movies that have tired tropes and blatant literalism, there’s a new movie watcher that hasn’t experienced it before. They have the same right to watching a new movie with a tired trop — because to them, it’s not yet tired.
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