The problem with movies today (1 Viewer)

I really like this guy's points:

Well, I think the problem today is the new school believes that narrative is a bad word, characterization is thought to be unimportant, and exposition is a giant no no.


John Wick is a perfect example of new school movie making. We know pretty much nothing about the character except his wife has recently died and toward the end of her life she thought to secretly mail him a puppy so it would arrive after her death. So, the character is basically a blank cliche. He's a bad man with a dead wife that likes puppies...which I guess is meant to be the "quirk" that makes us like him. There really is nothing else to go on and of course Reeves takes his usual block of wood approach to portraying him so...who cares about this John Wick guy? I mean most people like puppies but that's not enough to make me care what happens to this guy.


Now, when there is so little to the main character you know the "bad guys" he is going to come up against are going to be total cardboard cutouts...and boy in this film they are even less than that. We have the cliche of the rich bad guy's son who is a spoiled brat and a moron. The rich bad guy who is howlingly ridiculous and they may as well just show him gnawing on his desk in every scene and then there are his absolutely faceless minions who are just there to be slaughtered in the name of Daisy the puppy. Somehow Willem Dafoe walks through the set on his way to another movie and picks up a paycheck for carrying a gun as he does. What a waste of an actor and I guess we are supposed to care about him because...well..."Look it's Willem Dafoe!" and then he's gone.


John Leguizamo appears for a cup of coffee and to play the old "loyal crony" cliche that cares so much about "John Wick" that he throws the guys who stole his car out of his shop. I assume he is here because John seems to be at the point where he'd have a hard time getting work in pharmaceutical commercials.


There is never a doubt about what will happen in this film. It is like a lot of films today...all just a trial run to see if it might be worth making a sequel.


There is not an interesting or an original moment to be found and that is BY DESIGN. You could get up and go to the bathroom, go out for a cup of coffee, eat a sandwich, and buy the newspaper and not miss a single thing that would confuse you about the "plot" when you came back. There is no plot. The entire movie is "Guy with dead wife that also likes puppies is good at killing people will you pay to see him do this again in a sequel where we find out he also likes kittens?"


In part three we discover he likes goldfish.


It is all nice and shiny and beautifully lit though so it will look pretty on your HD display.

Thanks Sam, this guy is great. The two mini-docs are themselves well produced and very entertaining.

Glad ya liked it Steve. You can debate individual points of his but overall I like his way of thinking. Formula sells, but it's not sustainable forever.

The problem with movies today is that the industry is so big that quantity is more important than quality. The same can be said for video games and television programs.

The people involved with making the movies that got negative reviews like RIPD, Die Hard 4, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had to know that the quality was sub par, but a rehashed plot featuring an established star will typically break even.

There aren't enough excellent screenplays to go around, so they intentionality release mediocre movies.

I would check out the new film Kingsman. It will restore your faith about a good movie when you see one like when you first saw star wars, raiders, and many other classics.. the reason you love movies in the first place.


Jacob

I would add that Hollywood has a dearth of quality writers today compared to the past. Where are the Ernest Lehmans, William Goldmans, Robert Bolts, Ben Hechts, Billy Wilders, David Mamets, etc today? Hollywood in the past even embraced writers from other disciplines (Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, etc) but now that idea is almost completely ignored.


Good movies begin with good writers, regardless of genre.

Triple AAA movies carry a hefty price tag and as such are locked into appealing to the largest demographic possible to get a return on investment. That severely restricts story telling and cinematic options.


To find movies with story and deeper characterization, the smaller films and indies are where you have to go. Or television - including alternate sources like streaming companies.

atfree said:

I would add that Hollywood has a dearth of quality writers today compared to the past. Where are the Ernest Lehmans, William Goldmans, Robert Bolts, Ben Hechts, Billy Wilders, David Mamets, etc today? Hollywood in the past even embraced writers from other disciplines (Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, etc) but now that idea is almost completely ignored.


Good movies begin with good writers, regardless of genre.

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Don't agree with this. There are many more writers working today - and many good writers - in Hollywood and elsewhere. But finding them is like finding that good indie movie. The big book publishers are locked into the same issues as the big studios - selling books by the big name authors and getting on that top ten seller list.

Screenwriters used to come out of real life. Most were military veterans from one era of service or the other. Many had worked in a variety of rugged jobs. Borden Chase, one of the best western writers in Hollywood (RED RIVER, WINCHESTER '73, BEND OF THE RIVER, THE FAR COUNTRY, VERA CRUZ, et al), had been a sandhog (tunnel digger) and had written stories about that life before going to Hollywood. Ben Hecht, Herman Mankiewicz, Sam Fuller, and Sydney Boehm, among many others, had been newspapermen. Fuller drew on both his newspaper and WWII combat experiences in his writing. The list goes on. In contrast, so many screen and TV writers today simply went to film school and base their scripts on movies and TV shows they've seen and fantasy worlds they've thought up, or--even worse--relationships they've had in HS or college, if any. No real life experience.


Nothing wrong with thinking up fantasy worlds if you're a really good writer and can get readers eager to visit the worlds you've created, esp. if you're J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, or Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Burroughs wrote a few dozen Tarzan books without ever stepping foot in Africa.) But are the creators of the Hunger Games and Twilight and Divergent franchises anywhere near as good as those guys?

Another reason for the dearth of quality screenwriting that reflects the reality of the viewers' world is the fact that movies today have to appeal to audiences worldwide, thus the overwhelming emphasis on action, which is the same in all languages. Anything that reflects life in one particular culture or will, in any way, limit grosses in any area of the world has one strike against it.

Is this a trash John Wick thread? Ha. I loved John Wick and found it to be a great action film with plenty of style and a great story. Sorry it didn't work for you but I thought it brought something new to the genre. We can continue this discussion/debate in the John Wick thread btw.

Tino said:

Is this a trash John Wick thread? Ha. I loved John Wick and found it to be a great action film with plenty of style and a great story. Sorry it didn't work for you but I thought it brought something new to the genre. We can continue this discussion/debate in the John Wick thread btw.

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Of the ten posts above yours, only one mentioned that film you're referring to.

Vic Pardo said:

Of the ten posts above yours, only one mentioned that film you're referring to.

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True. Sorry. Carry on.

As for "What's wrong with horror movies", partly it's that we have a "Lost generation" that didn't get horror films for most of the 90's and early 00's--

After the slasher film was killed off, and the B-movie industry itself was killed off by the rise of VHS/cable and the death of B-theaters, horror films didn't see a need to hit their teen audiences hard, fast and cheap on a Friday night. The horror films that DID make it to theaters now had A-producers trying to keep themselves in the big cineplexes with fancy editing and cinematography, and hiring grownup A-list actresses instead of Jamie Lee Curtis.

Thus creating two "grownup" genres with no appeal to teens in the 90's and early 00's, the yuppie-horror "Babysitter from hell" genre, where rich middle-class yuppies are afraid that Some Crazy Person will take away their rich, privileged job or real-estate, and "Mommy-horror", where the A-list actresses now want the camera on themselves being hysterically maternal and concerned while protecting their child from demonic forces.

The few bits of genre horror we did have in the 00's were the few maverick breakouts--Saw and Paranormal Activity--which ran themselves into the ground trying to establish their own franchise cottage-industry without a second idea, and reminded us of why we wanted to get rid of the Friday 13th sequels twenty years before.


So now we have a teen audience that doesn't know what scares are, assume they must be a thrill ride, and want to use that to preserve the "arrogance" that the film "can't" scare them. Horror audiences have always "dared" an audience to scare them, but they want to laugh at the failed attempts as well, since, well, nobody understands us teens, you know. The thrill-ride audience we have today have become pretty much like those jokes on the later seasons of MST3K, where the comics would pretend to be obnoxious Friday-night teen audiences: "C'mon, start hauntin' something!"

For all the praise over Cabin in the Woods as "revolutionary", I found it jarringly snotty, in that it deconstructed every default horror genre, and said "you'll only scare us if you go over the top into fantasy": Teen-cabin thrillers are passed off as mechanical, ancient curses are considered "quaint", even Japanese hair-horror is given a borderline-racist pasting, and we're told it's all the fault of obnoxious grown-up old people...We want something else, the message says, but it never quite descends from its hip teen high-horse to go into specifics about what.



And as for what's wrong with action movies, well, that's easier: The actors just want to spend a couple weeks looking good holding a gun and beating up stuntmen. (Especially the heroines.)

The post above hit the nail on the head. The writers and directors that get work come out of film school with only knowledge of movies and TV - no life experience.

In the action video this thread is based on, John Wick was actually used as an example of a good action movie.

Ejanss said:

As for "What's wrong with horror movies", partly it's that we have a "Lost generation" that didn't get horror films for most of the 90's and early 00's--

After the slasher film was killed off, and the B-movie industry itself was killed off by the rise of VHS/cable and the death of B-theaters, horror films didn't see a need to hit their teen audiences hard, fast and cheap on a Friday night. The horror films that DID make it to theaters now had A-producers trying to keep themselves in the big cineplexes with fancy editing and cinematography, and hiring grownup A-list actresses instead of Jamie Lee Curtis.

Thus creating two "grownup" genres with no appeal to teens in the 90's and early 00's, the yuppie-horror "Babysitter from hell" genre, where rich middle-class yuppies are afraid that Some Crazy Person will take away their rich, privileged job or real-estate, and "Mommy-horror", where the A-list actresses now want the camera on themselves being hysterically maternal and concerned while protecting their child from demonic forces.

The few bits of genre horror we did have in the 00's were the few maverick breakouts--Saw and Paranormal Activity--which ran themselves into the ground trying to establish their own franchise cottage-industry without a second idea, and reminded us of why we wanted to get rid of the Friday 13th sequels twenty years before.


So now we have a teen audience that doesn't know what scares are, assume they must be a thrill ride, and want to use that to preserve the "arrogance" that the film "can't" scare them. Horror audiences have always "dared" an audience to scare them, but they want to laugh at the failed attempts as well, since, well, nobody understands us teens, you know. The thrill-ride audience we have today have become pretty much like those jokes on the later seasons of MST3K, where the comics would pretend to be obnoxious Friday-night teen audiences: "C'mon, start hauntin' something!"

For all the praise over Cabin in the Woods as "revolutionary", I found it jarringly snotty, in that it deconstructed every default horror genre, and said "you'll only scare us if you go over the top into fantasy": Teen-cabin thrillers are passed off as mechanical, ancient curses are considered "quaint", even Japanese hair-horror is given a borderline-racist pasting, and we're told it's all the fault of obnoxious grown-up old people...We want something else, the message says, but it never quite descends from its hip teen high-horse to go into specifics about what.



And as for what's wrong with action movies, well, that's easier: The actors just want to spend a couple weeks looking good holding a gun and beating up stuntmen. (Especially the heroines.)

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A related issue, I would argue, is the fear of scaring children. Baby Boomer parents don't want their children scared by movies anymore, even though that's one of the things that fairy tales are supposed to do! As the Grimm Bros. and Hans Christian Andersen, et al, understood. Disney understood it, too, so he put scary moments in his animated features. He got crap for it, too. There was quite an outcry about SNOW WHITE when it came out and Disney stood his ground. But he was a target of criticism throughout his career. Japanese animators understand it also. PRINCESS MONONOKE is pretty scary in parts. I heard a little girl crying in the theater during the opening scene when that worm-covered boar god attacked. Well, guess what? You're supposed to find something like that scary!


When children's films stopped being scary during the age of the VCR and cable TV, kids found ways to access R-rated horror movies via tape or staying up late to watch cable and got their scares that way. I'm not sure that was a good thing.


I, on the other hand, always identified with the monster, so Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man never scared me as a kid. Adults scared me back then. And, frankly, they still do!

Basically, if you want to say "What's wrong with movies today?" it's three categories:

- What's Wrong With Action Movies is the industry (the producers, studios, and agents who want to build personal play cops-and-robber "sandboxes" for their stars),

- What's Wrong With Comedy Movies is our society in general (and the last Bush Jr. generation growing up angry and uninvolved, now finding out that uninvolved high-school immaturity doesn't pay the bills, and wishing for a less-adult world where it still did), and

- What's Wrong With Horror Movies is the audience:


The audience thinks that horror is "ritual", and has to play by the rules--Don't open that door, the smart babysitter always survives, etc. And then they want to feel superior and laugh at it for playing by the rules.

But to be scared, something has to put you in a place where you're not safe, because the rules no longer apply....Like Hitchcock's audience who safely assumed Janet Leigh would survive to the end of her movie, since she was the star. Take away that hip audience superiority, and the audience is in the position of the character, who doesn't know if they're going to make it out safely.


Val Lewton was an expert in that, which is why the "Jump scare" that the YouTuber complains about is technically referred to in film circles as a "Bus", in honor of Cat People:



It's not the bus that scares you, it's the black panther you can't see.


Without that personal involvement, the audience is just sitting in a roller coaster of moment-to-moment jolts, and soon become those coaster fans who explain why wood is better than steel coasters, and why Six Flags has been going downhill.

I saw the rot set in with Movie quality soon after the arrival of the Multiplex. The Major Studios suddenly realised they were going to need a whole lot more releases to feed the needs of so many more screens. Volume of output was increased drastically, and consequently, before long the overall quality of films started to slide. There were just not enough creative talents available to produce the volume of good movies that would keep the standards as high as existed when single screens reigned. Fortunately, the later arrival of the Indies resulted in a New Dawn for movies of good quality. However, the transition to the younger audience demographic of the present day, has meant a slide in the output of good narrative films. Of course, the financial bottom line is what's important to the major studios. The question of good stories and good writing is somewhere further down their list of priorities.

avroman said:

I saw the rot set in with Movie quality soon after the arrival of the Multiplex. The Major Studios suddenly realised they were going to need a whole lot more releases to feed the needs of so many more screens.

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Studios release far fewer movies today than they did in the 'golden age' and less than even in the days before multiplexes.