I really like this guy's points:
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.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.
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.
True. Sorry. Carry on.Vic Pardo said:Of the ten posts above yours, only one mentioned that film you're referring to.
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.)
Studios release far fewer movies today than they did in the 'golden age' and less than even in the days before multiplexes.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.