how does 90s movie compare with say 60s movies that would be interesting too.
60s has so many good movies like 2001, psycho etc etc. it’s really the last 5-7 years where I feel the quality took a dive
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
#72A 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 movi…
I don't particularly disagree with you, but do you have evidence that modern movies are calibrated and written to allow for someone to sit on their phones the entire time and understand? Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along.
There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#73Also: 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
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#74Movies also have gotten to long. I long for 5he days of 90 min. It also meant cinemas could run more movies and had space for smaller releases too.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all crap, my friend. You can pretend Super Mario is different than Predator longer than you can pretend the Big Mac is different than the Whopper or Home Alone is different than Home Alone 2. Little kids can hold two stuffed animals and make up stories where they are different, but when you're older you can meaningfully accept that it all scrolls by and your life is the same whether you ate a Whopper and root fo…
I have no clue what point you're trying to make. Super Mario and Predator are both classics of their genre, they're massively different. A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place, or hell, even a chain that vaguely gives a shit like Five Guys or Freddy's. Home Alone 1 and 2 are both classics. If you genuinely have never felt different after consuming any art for your entire…
> A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place
You have agreed with me. They are essentially the same. There is no real situation where one cannot be substituted for the other. Now that you have stopped pretending, you may reach a point where you realize that my other statements are true as well.
Or, you may not. That sounds like my impersonalized version of hell.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#76Also: 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
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were. Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching th…
Escape from New York is the good one (in my opinion anyway)
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#77Also: 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
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#78Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore.
But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series.
There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#79The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast. * Many more shots from eye level * Significantly less jumpcuts * People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously * Waist-up or even ful…
While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days.
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
Re: Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix
#80These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling.
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.