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The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#111

Post by pjc50 »

detourdog wrote: post #107
PaulHoule wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Riffing on your SpongeBob comments. It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog. Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service. They are hampering discoverability.

> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service

I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.

> They are hampering discoverability.

At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#112

Post by woolion »

Duanemclemore wrote: post #21

I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away. Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"…

>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...

I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it. At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#113

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.

Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.

I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.

Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#115

Post by askafriend »

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 also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#116

Post by neuroelectron »

mpalmer wrote: post #99
neuroelectron wrote: post #93

New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct ? Rich people agree with them. Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.

"I don't have to read or argue with this, it's automatically bad because uh elitism" Now that's what I call a luxury belief!

[flagged]

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#117

Post by ajmurmann »

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 wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.

I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.

I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.

Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#118

Post by AnimalMuppet »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #110
gonzo41 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film. Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.

I'd be fine with the length if they actually used the time for something good.

If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.

Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.

Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...

Re: The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

#119

Post by schnable »

isodev wrote: post #103
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 sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it. So maybe, cinema is no longe…

Yes, and "prestige tv" took off, shifting a lot of viewing to 100 hour TV series.
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