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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

#91

Post by ToucanLoucan »

hyperhello wrote: post #75
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you always this insufferable when you speak, or do you just talk down to people trying to honestly engage with you as a matter of policy?

And no, I am not agreeing with you. Your statement is incomprehensible. Yes, the Whopper and Big Mac both suck to a degree where they are interchangeable. Home Alone 1 and 2 are not interchangeable at all. They have things in common, they have strengths and weaknesses, and I guess if I was in the mood to watch one, and only two was available, I wouldn't be heartbroken about it, but both have enough going on that they both deserve their own existence as well.

And Mario and Predator is just.. I have no idea what you mean. As someone who has experienced both the urge to watch Predator and play Super Mario, no, one is not remotely a substitute for the other. That's just wacky.

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

#92

Post by phantasmish »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #82
phantasmish wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster -type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of…

I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.

Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.

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

#93

Post by whilenot-dev »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #77
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

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...

The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office:

- Blade Runner (1982)

- Brazil (1985)

- Donnie Darko (2001)

- Fight Club (1999)

- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

- The Thing (1982)

The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films

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

#94

Post by beej71 »

D13Fd wrote: post #43
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

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…

There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.

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

#96

Post by hyperhello »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #91
hyperhello wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you always this insufferable when you speak, or do you just talk down to people trying to honestly engage with you as a matter of policy? And no, I am not agreeing with you. Your statement is incomprehensible. Yes, the Whopper and Big Mac both suck to a degree where they are interchangeable. Home Alone 1 and 2 are not interchangeable at all. They have things in common, they have strengths and weaknesses, and I gu…

[flagged]

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

#97

Post by DrierCycle »

Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances.

Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.

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

#98

Post by queenkjuul »

hyperhello wrote: post #96
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you always this insufferable when you speak, or do you just talk down to people trying to honestly engage with you as a matter of policy? And no, I am not agreeing with you. Your statement is incomprehensible. Yes, the Whopper and Big Mac both suck to a degree where they are interchangeable. Home Alone 1 and 2 are not interchangeable at all. They have things in common, they have strengths and weaknesses, and I gu…

[flagged]

As a neutral third party, no, you just actually aren't making any sense.

I think i can imagine the point you're maybe trying to make, but that requires me to make a lot of assumptions

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

#99

Post by jauntywundrkind »

phony-account wrote: post #31
kridsdale1 wrote: post #9

In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously. Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800. Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actuall…

> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. Let me introduce you to some film history: https://neiloseman.c…

-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.

A focal plane mere inches thick!

Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!

But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.

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

#100

Post by hyperhello »

queenkjuul wrote: post #98
hyperhello wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

As a neutral third party, no, you just actually aren't making any sense. I think i can imagine the point you're maybe trying to make, but that requires me to make a lot of assumptions

The original post was about how he was angry that his friend was messing around with his phone during a movie. Why does this bother him? He feels his friend was not respecting the integrity of art, that he is missing important things in life, that meaning and value is lost as his friend treats his screen time as a flood of dopamine.

What I was trying to tell him (really just talking into the social media void) is that it's all meaningless anyway. When you're young you care, but as you mature, that feeling of the perfectness of your screen time becomes a childish thing. It is much like the difference between two lousy fast food burgers, the metaphor he partially understood but reduced to "they are both lousy" which wasn't my point.

But his behavior was a little too immature for me, with the brinksmanship and oh-so-daring insults to my intelligence, so I probably got sidetracked in my response and it wasn't very good.

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