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Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

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Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#11

Post by speedgoose »

> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything.

I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy.

I think we have some bias too.

We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#12

Post by throwaway894345 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #4

Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.

I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#14

Post by speedgoose »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #8
dosinga wrote: post #3

Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight

When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?

Poop doesn’t get better with age. But you have good movies in the 2010s.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#15

Post by hyperhello »

solfox wrote: post #6

It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.

Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#16

Post by aunty_helen »

carlosjobim wrote: post #4

Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.

I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow.

Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#17

Post by dylan604 »

sema4hacker wrote: post #7

Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.

> movies in general are now produced more frequently

I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#18

Post by mandevil »

A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?

Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

#19

Post by EA-3167 »

speedgoose wrote: post #11

> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything. I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy…

I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had.

Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.

The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.

That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.

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