381–390 of 485 posts
this guy clearly has not seen "VelociPastor"
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In my opinion, this is the reason: > Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other. If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassi…
Non-verbal creatures don't make very good antagonists on their own. Jurassic Park's premise makes it a story about human folly, but the time travel setup would make them a distraction from a moral quandary that we're already very accustomed to. On the other hand, zombie movies get a lot of this for free. Hell is full, there is no rest, humans are the real bastards.
Good films are hard to make, that's why. The article sort of skips over this, but there aren't a lot of Spielbergs out there. Most big-budget movies are lame, and intentionally so. Hollywood is about making money, not good films. Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally h…
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
* Plot
* Well written
* Inherent meaning
* Intelligent
* Acting / Directing
* Name brand actors
* Size of cast
* Cinematography
* Music
* CGI / Special Effects / Locations
* Props / Clothes / Styles / etc
* Action budget (choreography, explosions, etc)
* Marketing / Marketability
* Release logistics
What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
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I thought that it still isn’t really known? Is is one common theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.
Finding the impact crater pretty much cemented it. It absolutely happened. The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction on its own or if other factors compounded the problem.
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> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix. Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit. The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only. There are no sequels to The Matrix.
I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect. They couldn't recapture the key reveal of the Matrix. It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead". And without that, it's just another action movie except "bullet time" is no longer innovative. Their solution was to go deeper into the mythology and the large…
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As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie. Alien: Resurrection is plotted te…
Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator. > Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner? Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuste…
He wrote a lot of "strong female characters" that in retrospect all kind of look identical, and get into... suspicious situations. His quippy dialogue is also the kind of thing you might enjoy in small doses, but you quickly realize all his characters just talk like Joss Whedon and have no characterization (besides Tough Guy, Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold, and Waif who knows karate).
Back when it was doled out once a week on Buffy it was novel, but if you try and binge any Whedon content now it's pretty painful absent the nostalgia.
Edit: I forgot the fourth Whedon archetype: Waif who likes having sex but she owns it so it's feminist and not just Male Gazey.
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The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail? “Real world” stories don’t need to dwell on it much because you can just use history and real life - if you ba…
> The book [...] didn’t You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :) Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems. Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both. Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action mo…
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
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We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry. Glares at Game of Thrones
GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.