I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down, the examples were all over the place.
> I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down
By the sounds of it, the author would be okay with that!
The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
421–430 of 454 posts
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#422> There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”
man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#423Quite a bad piece, the end note is ironic: the author doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention for a film critic apparently interested in litteralicity.
> An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”
I cannot see any common denominator in the multiple examples that the author gives and cannot relate to them (what point is there to put on an equal footing a micro analysis of a dialogue in Megalopolis -voluntarily grotesque- and the choice of film format in The Architect?).
Maybe there’s an intuition here, but I feel it is not well illustrated. The author probably hopes that she will be remembered for coining this wishy washy concept.
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.
I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a cloud might look like a shape in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. Poor rubes, I'm just more insighftul in the field of nimbohermenutics. The internet has revealed to us normals that an awful lot of "trust me, I'm upper class, this really is superior" was the idle rich patting each other on the back, empty posturing, tax dodges, a game of words as a passtime and social in-group signalling. Twitter and ubiquitous videos of daily life have broken the illusion.
Am I willing to hold the idea that a movie might be good in a way that goes over my head? Yes - take books, I'm never going to read James Joyce, I won't study the historic texts it references, I won't learn the Dublin colloquialisms, I won't understand his wordplay, and I accept that the people who do will get a lot more satisfaction from reading it than I would get from the few scraps I might make sense of.
But if you tell me the painting of a blue rectangle is worth millions, and I just don't understand because I'm a simple pleb and you're a true art connoisseur, and that the art house movie just has more sophisticated culture that a low-brow wouldn't understand, I go back to saying that if you stare longer at the clouds you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you are sharper and more imaginative you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you enjoy finding patterns in clouds you will find more of them. That doesn't mean some clouds have more meaning in them.
And if it's you telling me I can join your club of exclusive film afficionados if I pay the member's fee and spend hours watching the film, or that I can read your educated critical thoughts on 2025's Cloud Patterns in your review column in Cinema Monthly magazine, well that's sounding more like a racket.
Two different people recommended Severence to me [it's a streaming series about people who have their brains severed so when they are at work they cannot remember the outside, and outside they cannot remember their workday]; I find it boring. Is that because I'm a simpleton who can't appreciate social commentary and can't follow unusual storylines, or is it because I've read a lot more SciFi and spiritual self-help mumbo-jumbo than either of those people have, so the ideas are less novel and exciting to me? Sure there are objective things like "this lighting and camera technique was pioneered in $FILM" which I can't see and you might get enjoyment and satisfaction from noticing, but is that really different to me commenting that they have CRT/desktop computers harking back to the IBM XT instead of going with a Star Trek LCARS style flat UX, or that the Data Reduction team shouldn't be able to work with encrypted data because good encryption would not give any information about the plaintext content, or that using the computers to show numbers-as-text is really broken because computers are a tool for turning numbers into human-friendly graphs, sounds, pictures, and by showing the computers as dull numbers machines the writers are revealing society's lack of deep computer understanding and we've all missed the point of Jobs' "computer as bicycle for the mind"?
And there are more subjective things to say about media e.g. "this is Plato's Cave" but is it really, or are you seeing Plato's Cave in the clouds because you were hunting for Classic Memes or because you have spent more time studying the Classics so the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon kicks in and you notice more of the things you know about?
Sure, sure, "all art is the same, nobody is any better" says the intellectually sterile internet commentor. Sure, sure, you're just a higher calibre of person and it's not that everything in life is a status game and you're positioning yourself as higher status by self-declaring that the things you spent more time on are the better things. Yes, people are smarter than me, people know more than me, people see more connections in films than me - but the medium through which I learn those things, the way that message gets to me, is very suspect; why am I reading a newspaper column where you take a broadcast position and get paid to tell me that you see more meaning in a film than me? Why are you, the sublime intellect, spending your life watching films and commenting about them on the grubby pig-mud internet while claiming deep meaning, instead of fixing the world or sitting ZaZen on a mountain top? Why am I hearing about this from a Film Professor whose income depends on people believing that film is deeply meaningful, or from a Film Studies graduate whose self-image is partly supported by the idea that their expensive degree is about more than just simple entertainment? The medium is the message, and the mediums are not truth-finding, they are marketing and entertainment.
It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".
And isn't nature wonderful, but is this art?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVmw3ZhdzEs - Steamed Hams, in the style of the banned Soviet film Glass Harmonica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynyv3oHDRg0 - Steamed Hams, but it's French New Wave cinema.
There's no curiosity that Steamed Hams might be more than what you saw it to be. Sad times.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#425As someone forced to sit through "substance" while the recommender was "yass queening" the whole time, I can confirm that the movie thinks you have an IQ of 75. "Oooh ooh! Men bad! Male gaze only reason women try look sexy! Yes queen slay, Grug owe you attention for living! Western pedo town all problem caused by men look no further"
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For us at the time, it was magnificent. At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater? The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002
I’ll chime in as a grey beard. Did we think the DVD was the same as being at the theater? It really depends on who your friends were. Some of us kids had techie parents that had things like VGA projectors for presentations. We would take these and play DVD’s off our full-tower Pentium 3’s at movie theater-like experiences. I fondly remember watching the Matrix bonus content with my friends over a giant 100ft wall. Fi…
DVD is 720x480
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#427Hollywood 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.…
I agree. The article feels like it's onto something but ultimately fails to say anything new.
The opinion that most movies are dumb, and only a few of them respect their audience and are worthy of awards and praise, has been true for as long as movies have existed
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.
I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a cloud might look like a shape in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. Poor rubes, I'm just more insighftul in the field of nimbohermenutics. The internet has revealed to us normals that an awful lot of "trust me, I'm upper class, this really is superior" was the idle rich patting each other on…
> It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".
Everything you said was baked into my post already, so it's funny to me that your conclusion ends up being the exact phenomenon I was talking about. I don't feel like going point by point but nothing you said was something I haven't considered.
Yes! Sometimes there are experts in higher-up places that do simply just understand something deep and insightful that you don't, and they may not have a peer-reviewed scientific study justifying this. You are allowed to not accept this - it may even be true, although I don't think so - but how are you going to keep thinking about what you might not know yet if you're already convinced you know about as much as the author does?
Like... are you going to keep thinking about the ideals in Star Trek if you think you know more than Gene Roddenbury? Are you going to keep thinking about what Lord of the Rings means if you're absolutely certain no author could really be THAT insightful? I've already come to a conclusion here: no.
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#429I 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…
One interesting example here is Joker. It seems like the filmmakers did not like the audience they attracted with the first film, nor the messages that this audience took away. So the sequel seems like it was intentionally designed to piss that audience off.
I think I agree with that. It was not the first movie where I remember talking with people who said that it was a bad movie because it could be interpreted in a harmful way. However, it was the first movie where that seemed to be the prevailing opinion in my social group. People complained about toxic readings of the movie, and when I asked them how well they thought those readings were supported by the movie, and what readings they personally took away from it, they wouldn't answer those questions, because they regarded them as distractions from the more important phenomenon of toxic people enjoying the movie.
Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good point. Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves. And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point wh…
I feel the same way about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Napoleon Dynamite, but just wanted to add that Michael Keaton’s portrayal was still brilliant and I’m happy he could still pull it off. The plot and all the non-Beetlejuice scenes were a waste of time.
True! I also could feel the absence of Geena Davis and Alex Baldwin. They had real chemistry in the original movie and real connection to Wynona Ryder. They played perfect foils against Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice as well.
The original was an ensemble cast movie where each person put something into the movie all to support each other, which pushed Michael Keaton's performance far above what it could have been all on its own.
I mean, Michael Keaton was a great Batman in the 1989 movie. Putting him up against Jack Nicholson was a great move, and I think that as Batman he worked really well to both make Batman cool but also to make the villains look properly villainous. His only downfall was that he didn't make a great Bruce Wayne, his energy was too chaotic and over the top for a composed stoic billionaire.
That aside, I think Michael Keaton needs an ensemble to shine his brightest, and they did not give him a strong ensemble in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Don't get me wrong, there are great actors and actresses in the movie, but there was not a lot of time spent with them, reacting off of each other. Each person was on their own solo quest and Beetlejuice mostly either worked alone or so quickly and efficiently dispatched his enemies that they barely had a paragraph of interaction with each other.
It missed out on the synthesis and charm of the original in my opinion, even though each person was good to great on their own.