441–450 of 454 posts
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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
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Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categori…
> " Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies " Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality…
last year i thought Hundreds of Beavers was a lowest common denominator movie but it turns out to be cult and im 0/5 on any of my family members liking it at all. a few movie nerd friends love it like i do. after that i decided normys must only like watching families hug on screen. i guess EEAAO has that, i just see the Swiss Army Man inside of EEAAO and think of the whole thing differently
most likely i have no grasp on what normys like
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> people who have intercourse while staring at their phones This can’t be real. Surely no one does this. Do people do this?
I doubt it. Though, amusingly, people notoriously put on Netflix with the intention of having sex. Though the general expectation is that they're focusing on the sex to the detriment of the Netflix, not the other way around.
"Congress" is another vintage word for it. It's apropos given how the COTUS fucks around (in the present), and probably also did so 249 years ago being an inadvertent double entendre then given the making laws was and is also a contentious dance.
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The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.
Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development
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Part of it is that modern mainstream movies are so expensive to make. They need to be global to recoup their expenses. Much like videogames, the answer seems to be to look for indie and foreign works with less pressure on them to be easily consumable.
If they were good they wouldn't have to be so expensive.
The problem with movies is they're worse bets than startups and so big productions are the primary ones that get distribution and marketing. Kind of a self-reinforcing power law distribution that leads to a few getting most of the money.
The tiny ones need to find cleverer ways to get free marketing Richard Branson-style and try to include at least one celebrity.
Examples of shoestring budget success stories:
- Napoleon Dynamite 400k USD (2004) (680k USD today)
- Mad Max $200k AUD (1979) (760k USD today)
- Fruitvale Station 900k USD (2013) (1.24M USD today)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail £ 175k (1975) (2.5M USD today)
- Easy Rider 400k USD (1969) (3.5M USD today)
- Mean Streets 500k USD (1973) (3.6M USD today)
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Many of Kubrick's movies were panned at release and only received merits upon reexamination. Even 2001 was initially met with a mixed reception. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...
2001 is one of those movies that get better with every rewatch. The only part that doesn’t get much better is the stat gate sequence, which starts to get a bit long after a couple watches. Otherwise, every minute detail is masterfully crafted into the finished movie.
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”. Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean” Like, dudes, what did you think…
For the less enlightened of us, what is the joke?
Then, as a non English native speaker, I thought it was a word play ("you have had a bad Phil o Sophie ass" + "I had too many" or something).
Then, reading the responses to your comment, found it was the witty canned response I originally thought all along...
The Gladiator II example is just lampshading. If you just wrote "the prisoner grabbed the weapon the guard brought in to the cell, and then killed the guard with it" the very first thing someone's going to ask is "well why did the guard bring a weapon in?" and then the writer says "oh well he didn't consider it a usable weapon" and then "but clearly it is, so that doesn't really solve anything" and rather than coming up with a better escape method the writer just leans into the absurdity of it - the on the nose dispensing of folksy wisdom establishes that the guard is just an idiot rather than leaving the audience to contemplate the contrived situation.
For Megalopolis, “What do you think of this boner I got?” [he shoots her] isn't exactly a compelling scene when reading it. It makes a lot of sense to punctuate the scene with some emotion to make it make some sort of sense. Can this emotion be shown on film without dialogue? Possibly, but the writer can't be sure how it'll actually look, and they need to convey to both the actor and director what emotion needs to be conveyed. It sounds like placeholder dialogue which could be cut or changed as needed.
For the Apprentice, again the writer likely doesn't know exactly how the scene is going to turn out. Is "Trump Tower" going to be clearly legible on the model as the scene is shot? Do you even want to spoil it by showing the name on the model? The point is this is supposed to be a reveal.
In all three cases, these lines very well could be great with proper setup and delivery, or perhaps could have been reworked into great lines. The issue is just these are mediocre films. None made any serious attempt to polish their scripts. It's not a deliberate tactic to dumb down movies or deal with poor attention spans, it's just the makers of the movie saying "eh, good enough."
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I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.
How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much. I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "ham…
If I scroll down far enough I’ll loop around and if I scroll through the categories given they’ll overlap. But if I go to someone with different enough taste I’ll see there are things I’d like to be aware of which I don’t k ow how to engage without already knowing about them. We expect this for languages foreign to us but why is it also true for anything the least bit challenging to one’s usual taste?
I still silently and slowly read novels, but as of now, that's a different media experience. Its slow pace is also enjoyable in a different way.