Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 454 posts

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#311

Post by busterarm »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #248
nozzlegear wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be. So now we just wait…

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a t…

I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.

I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.

The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.

The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#312

Post by ctoth »

dkarl wrote: post #161

I think what this means is that the movies now care whether the least-common-denominator viewers get their "point." Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it. Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The abilit…

Might it be as simple as: before, the LCD viewer who didn't get it had no platform, now they do? Responsiveness to Rotten Tomatoes instead of Roger Ebert?

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#313

Post by dylan604 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #202
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…

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be. So now we just wait…

The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#314

Post by dylan604 »

ghaff wrote: post #298
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a t…

Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun. These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience. I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.

I much prefer going to the museum with an IMAX to see that content vs the next superhero tights wearing flick in IMAX

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#315

Post by vunderba »

aydyn wrote: post #200
adrianN wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What in your mind was the golden age of serious anime? There's tons of trash today (cough 99% of isekai cough), but there was plenty of trash in almost any era of anime. How much god awful "harem anime" came out in the 90s/00s?

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#316

Post by busterarm »

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…

Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.

The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.

How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)

That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#317

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

dylan604 wrote: post #313
nozzlegear wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be. So now we just wait…

The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater

Yeah, I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I've found myself wanting earplugs, especially with showings in Imax. Much much too loud, so loud it hurts. Who wants that?

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#318

Post by dylan604 »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #248
nozzlegear wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be. So now we just wait…

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a t…

> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#319

Post by dylan604 »

briliantbrandon wrote: post #275
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a t…

> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience. I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell pho…

> the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.

I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#320

Post by dylan604 »

petters wrote: post #293
Cpoll wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be an outlier. Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match. Furthermore, the 4:3 version of a movie is almost always a crop from the intended ratio, so information and intent is lost.

> Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match. It's pretty big vertically as well. IMAX is close to 4:3

I've wondered why they haven't done an anamorphic IMAX to use the full screen instead of cutting back and forth from wide to square.
Post reply on HN