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Why Modern Movies Suck - They Teach Us Awful Lessons

The Critical Drinker · Youtube · 323 HN points · 2 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention The Critical Drinker's video "Why Modern Movies Suck - They Teach Us Awful Lessons".
Youtube Summary
Movies are great for teaching us useful life lessons, inspiring us, warning us, and generally showing us how to be better people. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten how to do this stuff, and the result is they're giving their audiences terrible life lessons. Let's take a look at why.
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
The Critical Drinker does a brilliant analysis of how don't modern female heroes often present hideously bad role models: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnuqp4_K7ik

He also does a scathing analysis of She-Hulk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Rt0en0f_pU

Mar 12, 2022 · 323 points, 393 comments · submitted by jdkee
BoppreH
Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, with quiet, mumbled lines[1]. I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on, or to miss a good chunk of the dialogue.

And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase, speech patterns, or novel vocabulary choices when the audience is struggling to understand even the most basic, predictable sentences.

[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

Edit: for people mentioning audio mixing and stereo, that's only part of the problem. Even with my (admittedly cheap) 5.1 setup, I sometimes miss most of the dialogue in some scenes. I think the change from theatrical to more realistic enunciation is also to blame.

viraptor
> I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles

The silver lining here may be that people stop treating subtitles as torture and see some non-English titles more often. There are some fun movie cultures out there beyond Hollywood, but I've found the "ugh, I've got to read‽" response common.

gcthomas
In the UK people prefer subtitles to dubbing, although that is different across parts of Europe. Foreign language programmes are quite popular.
foobarian
I do love watching foreign shows on their original audio track. Korean especially has an awesome sound! For example right in the first ep of Squid Games, protagonist talking with his elderly mom, lines where he is disagreeing or making excuses end with this long up-and-down "huuuuuuuuuh!" sound that is the coolest thing ever :-)
tnbp
I appreciate your inclusion of an interrobang here, which, like non-English movies, is too often overlooked.
JadeNB
I definitely watch all movies, English and foreign, with subtitles, and can't stand dubbed movies. I've found an amusing effect of well subtitled movies is that sometimes I forget that they're on, and, if I walk away and can only hear the dialogue but not see the subtitles, then I have to take a minute to process why I can no longer understand it ….
glandium
I have the opposite problem. Subtitles draw my attention, even when I understand what's said just fine. And then it's extra distracting when the subtitles change the meaning of what is said (which happens both when watching Japanese movies with English or French subtitles, or English or French movies with Japanese subtitles)
JadeNB
> which happens both when watching Japanese movies with English or French subtitles, or English or French movies with Japanese subtitles.

Also, though with less frequency, sometimes when the subtitles are in the same language as the speech, which I agree is distracting. (I am monolingual, so do not experience it otherwise.) But I had rather experience that dislocation than dubbing, which to me reliably ruins even a beautiful movie. Of course à chacun son goût!

dazc
As it happens, I was watching a foreign film (Italian) last night with english subtitles but the dialogue was also muffled and I found it just as difficult to watch.
gonzo41
I've always found that subtitles for a non english movie actually results in me watching the move an walking away with a more memorable experience than if I'd just been listening. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but it's mine at least.
greggsy
I’d wager that many engineers are still mixing for the cinema experience, but the vast majority of people are consuming media via their TV’s, laptops, tablets and phones, with an extremely diverse range of audio quality and placement. Findings a happy medium is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

There’s certainly a need for a ‘context aware’ format that can dynamically change the way sound - particularly speech - is delivered based on the device, volume, or even physical setting. (I suspect that this is about as useful as the ‘loudness’ button on many older amps though.)

ratww
That would be a fair bet, but a lot of modern movies are difficult to understand in a cinema as well.
elliekelly
I can’t wait for the day Netflix gives us the ability to adjust volume by category like video games. Different sliders for dialogue, background music, explosions, etc.
hedora
I've noticed an even newer effect: Making scenes almost all black. It might be a software problem with the HBO Max app's gamma and brightness settings, but it's absolutely the case that, during the day with thin curtains drawn, I had to put a thick blanket over my head and an iPad in order to see the highlights in some of the darker scenes in one of their recent original productions (probably Raised by Wolves Season One; can't remember for sure).

These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.

mixedCase
Yep I subbed to HBO to get GoT a couple of hours before "other sources" and immediately cancelled mid-way through last season. Night-time fights were just pitch black and a few smudges moving around the screen.

They probably just throw the thing into ffmpeg with the fewest amount of arguments that satisfies a codec and bandwidth cost metric and call it a day.

However, I've never had any problems under the same situations on Netflix using a "blessed" 4K HDR10 set-up (Fire TV Cube and a cheap Hisense TV).

Cerium
In the past I have adjusted the black level on my video player to make movies like this watchable. It won't look good, but you can make the few shades they used visibly different.
0xcde4c3db
This sounds a lot like "dynamic contrast", i.e. varying the display's light source brightness with the scene brightness. I can't speak to whether or how the iPad implements it, but it's a common behavior of LCD screens. It's configurable on some devices.
drexlspivey
You can just cover the light sensor (right next to the camera) if you don’t want to mess with menus instead of using a blanket.
thfuran
But that would dim the display. Selectively illuminating the sensor would boost display brightness.
cvuls
I'm guessing you're using a stereo setup then, dialogue is usually mixed into the centre channel, downmixing a 5.1 or 7.1 stream to stereo will produce those results.

even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue

birksherty
I watch using headphones and dialogues are still difficult to hear. Now I use vlc method to make them audible.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...

cvuls
that would be because headphones are stereo.
mrslave
How to do this in mpv? Then we'll automate it with a short shell script!
RobertMiller
There are a few ffmpeg filters you can use with mpv to get this effect, though you may have to fiddle with their options to get what you want. acompressor or dynaudnorm might be what you're looking for.

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#dynaudnorm

To use them with mpv you'd do something like `mpv --af=lavfi="[dynaudnorm=param1=value1:param2=value2:param3=value3]" ...`

(make sure the first parameter is preceded by a '=', not a ':' because reasons)

kabes
I've got the full klipsch THX ultra 2 system (7.2), and I also find dialogues in modern movies much harder to understand than in older releases. I think they should mix in more of the dialogue in the front left and right channels
micromacrofoot
considering the vast majority of people listen to movies in stereo, why don’t they include a decent stereo mix?
loufe
Christopher Nolan's Tenet was a prime example of horrible stereo translation. I could hardly understand the dialog. I've never changed volume so much during a movie. IIRC he refused to produce any audio mixes aside from those meant for the most premium 7.1 stream theatres. What a shame.
rhino369
That mix was garbage even in 7.1. I had to add 10db to the center channel.
crtasm
> will produce those results.

If that's commonly the case then whatever is doing the downmix isn't fit for purpose.

I found on Kodi you can boost the centre channel when downmixing, this helped quite a bit for me but I still watch with subtitles.

mysterydip
Don't many people have just a stereo setup still (myself included)? Why would a newer standard be backwards-hostile like that?
RobertMiller
In many cases, people ostensibly using stereo sound may as well be using mono sound. Stereo speakers built into a TV that's 20 feet away, or watching a video on their smartphone without headphones; technically these people are using stereo sound but with the speakers so close to each other relative to the listener, it might as well be mono.

I think if you want to make widely accessible audio content, you should be taking this into account. Make it intelligible in mono first, then worry about the rest.

willcipriano
As a counterpoint, I have both 5.1 via ARC and Dolby Atmos system hooked up via eARC and dialogue is still quiet in some modern releases. Older movies sound great though.
cvuls
this will be because more recent movies will be utilising high dynamic ranges for audio, worked around by compressing/limiting but in doing so, you lose quality.

trade-offs for everything.

there was a time when stereo was seen as unnecessary faff, too.

edit: movies are mixed for theatres and no longer are the home releases adjusted to suit.

jerome-jh
Gameplay and enunciation look quite standardized in modern movies. I remember a quote from a vietnamese director who said he cannot stand movies where you do not see people breath. Look at blockbusters: you never see people breath. When you do see them breath it is very much overplayed.
sandworm101
Female characters get to breath. Look at marvel movies. Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are seen pausing and breathing, mostly breathing in, but that is more for male gaze than anything else. In the pauses of fight scenes they are mouth agape, almost panting as the male characters stand like stones.
laurent92
The “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast” got me as much as “let’s make the sound inaudible on stereo to drive up the sale of 7.1 sound systems.”

VLC should have a setting such as “flatten sound to 70dB all the time and luminosity to 50% the ability of the display in average”. Even pirated packs are becoming unwatchable.

loonster
I've also seen GoT.
masklinn
> The “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast.

Pitch Meeting recently gave up the game there.

(in the latest video, Ryan jokes that they're making the screen darker and darker until they don't even have to project a video and can just play an audiobook over the speakers)

squarefoot
That problem is due to wrong downmix from multichannel to stereo. both VLC and Kodi have options to compress audio so that louder parts can be lowered. Here's the relevant Kodi wiki page: https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/System/Audio
Philip-J-Fry
The problem exists in the cinema too, so it's not that.
Krasnol
God...the headache I had coming out of the new Blade Runner...terrible.
toastal
I wear earplugs for live music when I go to the movies nowadays
Krasnol
I thought about something like that too but than there are dialogues which are already hard to understand because they're not loud enough just before you get blasted with sound effects again...well yeah..one more reason why I don't go to the movies so much anymore.
toastal
The types of ear plugs for music are high-fidelity and barely distort the sounds you actually want to hear, like dialogue.
Krasnol
Can you recommend a product?
toastal
Not in particular. At the time I was residing in the UK and just swung by a music store on the way to a show and asked the guy what he recommended and it's been on my keychain for several years.
seanp2k2
It’s also because producers and directors make more use of the “dynamic range” that theatre sounds systems are capable of today. They paid a ton of money for that music and they’re going to make sure you hear it. In surround setups, most of the dialogue is mixed into the center channel, which is behind the screen in theaters. At home, if you don’t have a center channel, you’re either relying on the stereo mix and however they decided to balance the speech on that, or if you play the surround version on a nice processor, it’ll probably let you adjust the center channel.

An audio compressor would also help here on consumer devices, as that would allow a variable degree and ratio of dynamic range flattening. Basically, it can form a band of volume and ensure that quiet sounds and loud sounds both fit into that. Sadly, most consumer gear, although already equipped with all the DSP they need to implement this in software, thinks consumers are absolute morons and/or that this wouldn’t be a selling point, so we get watered-down poorly-implemented dialogue boost features or largely no option at all except for the consumer to “ride the fader” and constantly adjust the volume. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-he... has some info on what’s out there today to address this, but yeah: it’s mostly fixable if consumers had control of the center channel mix + a configurable compressor + configurable EQ. There are ways to do this in consumer-friendly ways for folks who don’t know of care to learn about mastering audio for film, but the current situation is pretty bad and it really makes me wonder why so much mixing targets home theater setups vs built-in crap TV speakers. At very least, streaming companies could provide an alternate audio track [algorithmically] mixed specifically for built-in audio devices that has more clear dialogue.

I personally watch with subtitles because I don’t want to miss a word.

civilized
This was perfectly satirized a decade ago https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/87

...and still hasn't been fixed.

driverdan
Can you give examples? I've heard this before but have never noticed it myself. Is it possible you have hearing loss that you're unaware of?
bawolff
I personally don't find this happening as much as OP says, but nolan movies (e.g. interstellar) are an example where i have definitely had this.
driverdan
I've watched Interstellar with multiple audio setups and didn't have an issue understanding the dialog. It may have a higher dynamic range than most movies but that's a good thing.
SV_BubbleTime
Definitely a known Nolan issue.

I will go to my deathbed attesting that Tenet was the absolutely worst sound mixed movie of all time!

bawolff
I don't think not understanding the dialog matrially changes that movie.
BoppreH
Almost every movie that features Tom Hardy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSOWRsmibc

And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 . I'm not a native speaker, but (1) I've been communicating exclusively in English for years, (2) my hearing is quite good, (3) I'm wearing headphones, (4) there's nothing else happening in the scene apart from dialogue and music. But I still cannot understand Anne Hathaway's two sentences following the time I linked.

This movie also had a lot of another pet peeve of mine, which is shoulder dialogue where the foreground character is clearly not speaking, or saying something different.

zeruch
I agree with you on the former, not the latter. I find the "mumbling" more realistic dialogue (often in scenes where the script is supposed to be cramped and confusing) and feels more like natural human interaction.

But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.

analog31
If this were a conversation about mixing for recorded or live music, someone would invariably mention hearing damage. It's a huge problem. Could it be that the technicians are deaf?
commandlinefan
> I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on

Me, too… but my kids say they can hear everything just fine and please turn off the subtitles. It’s possible we’re just getting old.

lleb97a
Could it be we are use to media/news reporting so we struggle with movies?
ZiiS
I certanly also struggle with modern dialog. Another common factor is twenty years ago my hearing was much better.
Pasorrijer
A response to your edit, I was on a zoom call with current musical editors / producers and that is 100% part of the problem. Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.
CharlesW
> Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.

There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.

There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).

elevaet
Are lines ever recorded live? I imagined that they almost always re-record them in a sound booth later, it just seems like it would be so hard to get good sound on-set in most circumstances.
detaro
Yes, on-set audio is often used if possible. Re-recording is a bunch of extra work (you need to pay your potentially quite expensive actors for), needs matching, might not be as "in-the-moment" as the original, ... But re-recording is of course done where needed.
seanp2k2
This. These are largely mixing decisions, although it would be kinda weird to have a whispering actor boosted to sound as loud as a train in a scene.

The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en... - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.

LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/

https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normali...

and

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dol...

Give some insight into how this works.

gamblor956
Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.

Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.

Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.

glandium
I always wondered what people have against Tenet's audio. I originally saw it with headphones and using vlc and it was fine. Then I saw it on a TV and it was awful. I wonder if it was tested in normal environments.
nine_k
I remember that back in the day, actors re-voiced what they said on the set, but from a studio with proper recording gear, and sound engineers mixed these voices into the general soundscape.

Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.

wildrhythms
In some recent musical-to-film adaptations they recorded the voices ON THE SET during filming, often with no backing track or metronome, and then forced the music director, post-filming, to conduct the orchestra along with whatever the hell the actor was filmed doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ikqU6G6Xgs
vlunkr
It seems pretty short-sighted to blame it on actors. They are a low-level cog in the machine that are trained to exactly what they are told. It's the job of the director to get the performance out of them that will look good on screen. Can't the sound teams talk to them?

Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.

sandworm101
They are trying to be authentic. That is what actors are taught these days, to portray "realistic" characters that move and sound as realworld people. The net result is mumbling and tiny little movements that in turn mandate tight closeups and asmr-like microphone placement. Try that on a stage or in any live performance and you will be called wooden. Compare actors like Samuel L Jackson, Percival Ulysses, Jane Lynch or Rowand Atkinson. They dont need closeups and microphones secreted in hairlines. But they also rarely get leading drama roles, more often appearing as side characters who run on stage to tell the team the dramatic news.
ElephantsMyAnus
I'm not a native speaker, but, I think it's rather the opposite. It's very inauthentic.

English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.

What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.

umanwizard
> English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.

Sorry but this sounds like nonsense. Vowel distinctions absolutely matter in English. Think of how many words would be indistinguishable otherwise: bout, bought, bet, bat, bit, beet, boot, boat, bite, but, and bait are all distinguished from each other only by a vowel.

(And, yes, these all sound quite different to me, an American, though non-native speakers often have trouble making or recognizing some of the distinctions. Some native speakers further distinguish “bot” from “bought”, but I don’t.)

ElephantsMyAnus
I get that, but it matters very little in a typical sentence. I bet you could understand almost everything with all vowels replaced with schwas.
inetknght
> I bet you could understand almost everything with all vowels replaced with schwas.

No. Have you tried understanding someone who can only pronounce consonants but also whose dialect is foreign? It's unintelligible. Vowels absolutely serve a purpose. You're just used to hearing your own words spoken back to you in the same way you've always expected them.

ElephantsMyAnus
Different accents use different vowels, but they remain comprehensible. It's specifically those accents that also change consonants that are taken as hard to understand, such as Scouse.
plorkyeran
You can replace unstressed vowels with schwas and usually end up with something understandable. Stressed vowels cannot be schwaed. This is also specific to american English and doesn't work for other dialects, or even all american accents.
Hayarotle
An example of that is that even if we remove all vowels not in the beginning of words, sentences remain mostly intelligible. That's what happens in abjads like written Arabic and Hebrew, where vowels are mostly omitted and not distinguished from each other. For example:

I gt tht, bt it mttrs vr lttl in a tpcl sntnc. I bt y cld undrstnd almst evrthng wth all vwls rplcd wth schws.

theonemind
Some languages make you figure out a lot more by context. English forces an explicitness that not every language does, and context makes it pretty unambiguous almost all of the time, except in edge cases.

It might surprise you how much you can read without spaces, or vowels, or just mixing every letter in a word besides first and last.

nanomonkey
It may sound like nonsense, but in comparison to many other languages, English is super flexible with how vowels are pronounced and toned (entoned?). If you've ever tried to learn a tonal language, or one with more specific vowels like Khmer (which has 33 consonants and 22 vowels) you'd realize how relaxed English can be.

Generally this is in English's favor, I pronounce button differently than my NZ friends, but they still understand me.

umanwizard
American English has something like 15 distinct vowels. That’s not that much less than your citation of Khmer, and way more than many languages. Any claim that American English has a uniquely poor vowel inventory is just wrong.
nanomonkey
Perhaps I didn't specify that perfectly. I wasn't saying English is poor in vowels, I'm saying that it is flexible in how you use them. Khmer has 22 specific vowel letters, each letter that indicates exactly how the sound is made, even the differences that of how the previous letter will effect the sound.

English has 5, and no real consensus on how they are used, let alone the tone of voice that you need to use to indicate a specific word.

In tonal languages a rising vowel note is different than a falling, rising and then falling, falling then rising, flat or tumbling tone. The closest English has is the rising tone one makes when asking a question, but that doesn't change the meaning of the words entirely, just the context.

umanwizard
“Letters” are irrelevant. We are talking about the spoken language, not the writing system. American English has 15 or 16 vowels, and (not counting tone) the distinctions between them are just as meaningful as in Khmer or any other language. “Bit” and “beet”, or “but” and “boot” are different words, after all. Where are you seeing “flexibility” in the use of vowels?

Again, we are not talking about “letters” or the writing system here. Yes, there are many distinct vowels that are written the same, and conversely many different ways of writing the same vowel, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of spoken language.

And, yes, I know what a tonal language is, and you’re right that English isn’t one. It’s hardly unique or special in that. Most languages aren’t tonal.

nanomonkey
There are tons of examples, take "no" for example, you can pronounce it 'nooh', 'nah', 'nuh', 'neh', and yet it will be transcribed as "no". That one could be dismissed as negating is a pretty primitive concept.

My previous example of how to pronounce 'button' varies depending upon where you're from...but is still recognized by the most English speakers. Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.

Water can be pronounce in a variety of ways. Actually the list is endless...I'm surprised you're arguing the opposite. Compared to Spanish, or any number of languages where the vowels are very specific (disregarding the Castilian ascent), English is very forgiving. Bringing up Khmer's letters was to show that the vowel sounds have been formalized in that language, where English allows for much more variance.

Listen to any non-native English speaker, they can be all over the place and still understood.

umanwizard
> Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.

This is a distinction in consonants! Different realizations of the /t/ phoneme. The whole claim that started this thread was that English expresses information almost exclusively in consonants, not vowels. Your example directly contradicts that very claim.

Anyway, English is _far_ from the only language where different dialects have a different set of vowels. Quebec French for example has completely different ones from French French.

gcthomas
One big problem is that US actors have a history of recording adverts, so they are not classically trained, unlike a lot of British actors who have backgrounds on the stage and so have learned to speak clearly.

I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.

watwut
I like it better this way. Theatre like playing in movie come across as fake to me - as bad acting.

When the whole thing is clearly exaggerate comedy, then it don't bother me. But, if I am supposed to immerse myself in the story, it does not work.

Retric
Real people aren’t quiet around intense emotions and loud noises. This often comes off really silly, when actual people would be yelling they come off as mumbling to themselves.

Instead, actors are often chatting in front of green screens without any of the appropriate ambient sounds or emotional context.

watwut
Real people are often quiet around those. That is as normal reaction as loud yelling.
Retric
It’s so subconscious for people to speak lauder in a noisy environment that you might not realize it, but it’s so necessary we have started to program devices to do the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22651304/amazon-alexa-ada...

I am not saying intense emotions universally result in yelling, but people very rarely whisper when say calling 9/11. Even just kids playing tag get lauder.

watwut
People normally get mute in stressful situation. They normally have troubles to express things, they talk in weak voice, whisper or not at all. They have one word answers to complex questions. And anything in between. Some dissociate and act normal or follow normal script by routine.

They don't whisper to the phone, they will put more conscious effort to talk into 911 call ... or the shaken mute person won't be the one making call.

You seriously never had to ask people to talk louder in noise environment? The "people yell" assumption is artifact of movies, not reality.

Retric
Asking someone to speak lauder in a noisy environment is normally because they aren’t raising their voice enough rather than them failing to raise their voice at all. It’s not easy to judge how laud you need to be but the basic feedback of failing to hear your own voice if you don’t speak up prompts raising your own voice.

As to going mute, some people do completely shut down in an stressful situation, but that’s associated with for more than their voice. I have no issue with an actor in a war movie endlessly stacking ammo from point A to B. But if their having a coherent conversation, activity and productively responding to stimulation, that’s very different.

sandworm101
You probably hate clips like this. Male characters are dramatic, with big movements and loud voices to portray fear and disorder. The three female characters, including a very tough marine, are quiet and docile to engender escapist feelings of worry and protection. So which volume setting do you use? The camera is forced into an awkward zoom to reconcile the two.

https://youtu.be/VrVZHxH2O1I

"They mostly come at night. Mostly."

RobertMiller
I'd say the editors did a good job in this case, considering both "they mostly come at night, mostly." and "game over man, game over!" have both become iconic often-quoted lines.
sandworm101
Good memes rarely come from good writing.
RobertMiller
"If I took off the mask, would you die?"

"It would be extremely painful"

"You're a big guy!"

"For you."

hmm, you're probably right.

wolverine876
That is the incredible acting, not the lines IMHO. Imagine Bane played by an average actor - what a corny, laughable display it might have been.
baking
For anyone not familiar with The Critical Drinker's work, this should be considered to be part of an ongoing series:

Why Modern Movies Suck - Setup And Payoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOZgSyQjtA

Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Destroying Our Heroes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY-GLeHS0Ik

Why Modern Movies Suck - The Soft Reboot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyU63LJV3AE

Why Modern Movies Suck - They Teach Us Awful Lessons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnuqp4_K7ik

You can probably include earlier videos along the same theme, such as:

What Happened To Our Villains? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnRP7SKzOgk&t=22s

AckmanDESU
Because of this comment I went ahead and watched all of these videos as well as some more that were popular.

While I agree with some of his points about modern movies I feel like he has a huge issue with cherry picking old classic movies and comparing them against new movies with generally bad reviews. If you ignore good movies just to make a point then you’re not being genuine.

If that was my only gripe with his content then I’d probably watch it some more but I’m blocking his channel instead.

He tries to come off as an objective reviewer but he’s actually a sexist, antiSJW asshole. He’s basically thunderf00t if al he did was talk about movies. Not every video of his is biased against women and “woke” people but when he does mention the topic you quickly see his real colours. Some of his videos are completely mask off but in most of them it’s just a sentence or two, which is why at first I kept watching just in case.

But at this point I can’t tolerate him tbh.

I recommend anyone who is a legit fan of his to take a step back and analyze what this guy is saying on his videos and why. If he aligns with your political views that is fine but I can legit see a regular person being sucked into the alt right side of Youtube using this channel as a gateway for it. It starts with a few comments on how woke feminists are ruining movies and you slowly desensitize yourself and start agreeing with this bs.

blippage
One thing I've noticed is that is seems more recent movies lack character observations. Everything is done is in service of the plot.

I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).

It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.

Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."

How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.

IgorPartola
Are you sure you aren’t just remembering fondly movies you saw when you were younger? Both those scenes are huge tropes/clichés.
partomniscient
The first time you see a huge trope or cliche, its not actually a huge trope or cliche because to you its new and you get the full impact of whatever it is.

Its only over time that you get the "I know this situation", "I've been here before" possibly reaching the point of not wanting it again because you're oversaturated with said trope/cliche and now recognise them as such.

But the first ones stick with you and you remember them differently to the others.

ballenf
There was a lot of trope in those movies, but I think we'll look back at today's bad movies as 99% trope. It's just we don't see the tropes so clearly right now without a little distance.
unfocussed_mike
The 99% trope thing has an associated concept of its own: fan service.

Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.

But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.

And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.

There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).

You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.

Shugarl
But that's completely besides the point.

Tropes are nothing more than patterns we can observe in multiple stories. Clichés are tropes used extremely frequently. There's nothing inherently wrong about either of those things, it's only the way they're being used, the execution, that can be good or bad.

The James Bond one manages to add a touch of comedy, gives more information to the viewer about the characters who the characters are and how well they know each other, and makes the viewer remain attentive in what would otherwise be a fairly boring exposition scene. It has become used over and over again in various precisely because of how effective it is.

User23
Tropes are not bad[1].

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesA...

barrkel
Yeah, Casablanca is just a bunch of quotes strung together.
mellavora
I think you mean "Hamlet" or was it "Macbeth". One of the two.
barrkel
No, I didn't. That would be a slightly different joke.
bmelton
The thing with tropes is that they weren't always tropes.

This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.

Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.

So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.

People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.

RobertMiller
The Matrix fell hard to this. Slow motion bullet time? So passé!
aikinai
It’s like people complaining the Lord of the Rings is just all the fantasy tropes. Well they weren’t tropes yet when Tolkien invented them.
bsder
Worse, they were counterculture. "Bored of the Rings" came out in 1969.

People also forget that fantasy tropes were "evil and satanic" up through about the 1980s.

spywaregorilla
I feel like I'm going to call bullshit on this. I'm not convinced at all that this is less common in modern films. This one off example is nothing noteworthy. Plenty of similar examples in recent films.
JKCalhoun
The 70's were a great time for character driven film.

A more recent character-driven film that reminds me of the 70's was "About Schmidt" with, of course, that veteran of 70's films and filmmaking, Jack Nicholson.

Oh, "Frances Ha" comes to mind as well. You'll probably have to pick through the indie films to find character these days.

newsclues
I think being a Hollywood writer has become a prestige job, largely devoid of merit and the talent isn’t what it used to be.
warabe
I call that sort of "good" plots "character-oriented plot". One best example is Breaking Bad, which is not movie, but it is a great show anyway. The episode of Fly is a good example how well BB portrayed character's personality.

with character-oriented plot, we have character first, and let them play drama. It is like having initial condition and seeing how things evolve in Ordinary Differential Equation. Everything seems natural. I don't think screen play is not that simple, but good plot makes people think in that way.

On the other hand, with plot for the sake of plot, there is a predetermined plot at the outset, and as the show progresses, the actions and personalities of the characters are adjusted accordingly. There is no real personality there, just a cog in the wheel.

distances
> One best example is Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is my usual example of bad plot building. I'm sure I haven't given it a fair chance as it's universally so highly liked, but the plot events were very much built up so that you could see what's coming. You are already anticipating some events, or they feel predictable and made up, as if precisely to serve the show. They don't come through as authentic.

I stopped watching Breaking Bad in the first or second season due to this poor plot building, and Better Call Saul after a couple of episodes when I realized it's just more of that very same style of bad plotting. The difference to well written shows such as Sopranos is like night and day.

Negative comments about Breaking Bad and pointing out its flaws seems to often receive controversial reactions. I suppose it's because it's the favourite show for so many.

darkerside
Well, if you only watched 1.5 seasons and you have this strong an opinion about it, you deserve the downvotes. Like any good story, the ending is completely inevitable from the outset, when if you don't always see it coming. I hate when stories are unpredictable in an unearned way, just to be surprising, particularly when it betrays who the characters actually are.
distances
I didn't quite get what you're saying here.

I'm not claiming I got the overarching plot or character development of the series. It was the small plot hooks during the episodes that I found poor enough to make the show unwatchable. I've stopped watching a bunch of other shows for the same reason so it's not exclusive to Breaking Bad, it's just the most popular show to suffer from this style of writing.

unmole
> The episode of Fly is a good example how well BB portrayed character's personality.

That was a pointless filler episode that only got made because they ran out of money.

oriolid
Sometimes creativity comes from constraints.
xdennis
But it was the worst episode...
Joeboy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_episode
jpgvm
Knew this was Critical Drinker before I clicked on it. Mate introduced me to it and he is absolutely spot on for the most part.

Modern movies (and TV for that matter) have become so commercialized and expensive that the series they are now rehashing (Star Wars for instance) wouldn't be possible to create today. George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.

It's weird because I feel like some other forms of media, namely games and music have gone in the opposite direction because of the availability and power of tools for independent production. However movies just need so much more resources the same indie competition hasn't been able to come in and shake things up sadly.

CodeGlitch
> Knew this was Critical Drinker before I clicked on it.

Absolutely. He seems to be consistently spot-on with his analysis of TV and Movies and the wider industry. I also enjoy Red Letter Media:

https://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia

Both channels use a humours approach to their reviews and analysis.

onlyrealcuzzo
The biggest problem with movies is none of the labor has been automated much.

You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.

Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.

One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.

You just can't do that with film.

justinator
There are many examples of making a film on a budget of almost nothing. Clerks, Evil Dead, the Sweding movement, most all of Tik Tok…

You can make a compelling story via flip book.

Joeboy
"Almost nothing" in movie terms means "the cost of a house". Not "almost nothing" on a normal human scale.
justinator
I would actually say, "almost nothing" in movie terms means, "human scale almost nothing" all the way to perhaps, "cost of a house". We all have phones, video editing software is free, there's plenty of distribution channels. If you want to make a movie for "almost nothing", you can do so.

Doesn't mean it's going to be good, or that anyone wants to see it.

Is this a peculiar concept? We all work OSS every day, right?

Joeboy
True, to the extent that any 90 minutes of smartphone footage uploaded to youtube is technically "a movie". In order to be "a movie" in the sense that Evil Dead or Primer are movies, I would say you need a bit more than that.
justinator
I really wouldn't consider, "a budget larger than, 'x'" one of the defining traits of what, "a movie" is. That's gatekeeping.
Joeboy
I would also vigorously oppose such a view.
bmelton
ahem PRIMER
elevaet
I came here to say that too. If ever there was a quintessential HN movie...
onlyrealcuzzo
For anything with a niche target audience - sure.

You're not going to have multiple locations, good actors, good writing, good composition, quality cinematography, etc - unless you're incredibly talented and not counting how much your time is actually worth.

Films for a wide audience these days basically require - at a minimum - 6 specialists working for a month of shooting. Plus 5+ actors.

The absolute minimum that costs in labor - if you actually counted the value of your time - is ~$200k+.

A good script itself is worth well over $100k...

Realistically - it's almost impossible to make something with wide appeal for less than $2m in the US - or $1m internationally.

hotpotamus
I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot. Not so much in big, effects driven movies, but in everyday type shots where they can change backgrounds or remove things so they don't need to make big elaborate sets or control environments quite so much. That's my guess at least. Film was also a huge cost of production and especially distribution that's essentially gone now. I think Hollywood unions also add a lot of jobs - look up the job of focus puller sometime.

On the other hand to all the expensive stuff - you can just not do those. I'd take Primer as an example. I believe it was shot for the cost of a Toyota Corolla and became a fairly significant film. I've also seen "low budget" movies (meaning $3-5 million or so) in the last decade or so that probably would not have been possible 20 years or more ago, so I feel like there has been some progress.

KineticLensman
> I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot.

Yeah, but take a look at the massive number of VFX people listed in the end-credits of CGI-heavy films. Often several different companies (e.g. DNEG) each with its own array of artists, modellers, riggers, tech, pipeline engineers, asset developers, IT support, etc etc.

hotpotamus
Yep, that's what I mean when I say not so much in big, effects driven films - I suspect those will always consume as much budget as you throw at them because there's always a cutting edge to push. But in smaller and less effect driven films/TV shows, the tech seems to be a net win for productivity.
CuriouslyC
I don't think this argument holds for TV. Unlike movies which have a large sunk cost, require a coordinated rollout and expensive marketing, television can make a short proof of concept pilot season and doesn't require a marketing blitz. Television also doesn't have the expectation of budget breaking CGI/effects. As a result, TV can take chances and do things the suits would never approve for movies. If a show fails, it fails small, but if it succeeds it can do just as well as any movie (e.g. friends).
k__
So true.

I feared the Hollywoodization of the game industry.

But it never happened in the mindless extend of movies and music.

Indie games are still going strong.

dgb23
I mean there’s indie games that are works of art just like there are indie movies for the lack of a better term. Similarly there are plenty of popcorn games with big budgets and shallow content.
ekianjo
most indie games have shallow content as well... you are probably just cherry picking the top of the iceberg.
pawelmurias
Plenty of indie games have stunning visuals and lame cookie cutter gameplay.
k__
This might be true. But to me it seems like Indie games make real money. Mosty because making a good game requires less personel than making a good movie.
viraptor
I think all media you mentioned have similar effects and all have both Hollywood and indie areas.

I mean, some sports games are definitely hollywoodized with "let's just swap some colours, change 2021 to 2022 and charge another $70". On the other hand Bill Wurtz still releases new tunes on YouTube and Ben Levin continues doing... Ben stuff. In movies you can still get quality indie productions like Joel Haver's full movies. My random selection of course, but the point is, there's definitely indie stuff available if you want it.

xvilka
There are some jewels in the category of the short movies. For example, some films, even mini-series from the DUST channel on YouTube.
loonster
I agree with the box office movie theater experience, and yet movies as a whole still allow the offshoots. You cant find them in theaters, but you can fine them on streaming services.
objclxt
> George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.

I don't know if that's entirely true. George Lucas had come off the back of American Graffiti, which was an incredible commercial success. It had made 50x its budget, and in 1977 was the 13th highest grossing film of all time.

The question was really whether Lucas could turn his hand to a completely different genre. It's down to American Graffiti's success that Lucas was able to re-negotiate a deal for Star Wars that gave him merchandising rights.

JKCalhoun
My recollection of the history of The Star Wars though was that Lucas had begun to shop it around before Graffiti's success. Also "American Graffiti" was not an instant success but had more of a slow-burn upon its release.

Of course then "American Graffiti" caught fire and I suspect that (and the urgings of Francis Ford Coppola) is when Ladd gave the green light.

jpgvm
True, American Graffiti was pivotal in him getting the shot he did. What I am saying is I don't think that plays out the same way today given movie budgets, you can't just have one person like one film you made and force through the production budget of a AAA film anymore.
Joeboy
You do get to direct massively budgeted blockbusters based on one or two successful indies (Josh Trank, Ryan Johnson, etc). But you don't necessarily get to make the film you want to make, at least at a similar budget level.
JKCalhoun
Was "Star Wars" a AAA film though? I don't know what typical budgets were for films from that studio at that time were but in so many other regards it feels like it was a B-movie that over-achieved.

I mean just one aging star (sorry, Alec) in the film's credits.... That doesn't sound like a AAA studio effort.

whycome
Wait, what does AAA mean here? For beef, AAA is top of the line. For baseball, its the 'not quite good enough' level.
seanhandley
I worked for a while with a guy who'd worked at the BBC for many years.

His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.

A production team is looking to distribute their movie in as many channels as possible, and with the broadest appeal possible. As a result, you see a film made with the broad strokes but lacking in subtlety. If a film might be challenging because of the subject matter, the complexity of the dialogue, the character development, or the plot then it gets dialled back.

You lose the specific cultural references that give a film it's charm and it ends up not really being a true reflection of any people anywhere - just easy Friday night cinema fodder that maximises return on investment.

A movie sucks because it isn't art any more.

psychlops
Oddly enough, money is also why exciting movies are made. Not many people make movies, nor art, out of the generosity of their hearts.
seanhandley
No kidding.

I'm not saying "money is wrong, make all films for free".

When a production team makes a movie, they take a risk. I think the problem is that the people making the artistic decisions are also the ones trying to minimise risk and maximise revenue.

I appreciate a film needs to be a commercial success to make it worthwhile to the creators, but there comes a point where the artistic integrity has been utterly sacrificed and you get a dull, anemic, forgettable film.

psychlops
Fair enough. I thought you were going down the "capitalism is bad" route. I think I understand what you mean.

> I think the problem is that the people making the artistic decisions are also the ones trying to minimise risk and maximise revenue.

Knowing absolutely nothing about production, I would surmise there is a financial science and formula applied to films estimating modelling their potential profit. I mean something like "there must be x car chases to draw y amount of viewers" for an action film and so on.

Since such formulas would be based on past data, we rarely see something fresh as it's riskier.

CuriouslyC
You can have movies make money without having the money drive creative decisions. The bottom line focus of corporate content is the reason american pop culture has turned to shit in the last 20 years and everything is a remake or a rehash.
JKCalhoun
I think I would argue that the "art" is in fact made by people without the expectation of financial gain.

Everything else you're describing is not in fact "art", it's a product.

nathias
It isn't money, it's risk management/minimalization by large coorporations because that's their optimal strategy.
walkhour
Really good movies appeal to different audiences at different levels, if you're looking just for pure action, funny lines, you may find it there, and if you're looking for a deep story, you may find it there as well. So in theory, there needn't be a contradiction between a wide audience and an awesome movie.

Admittedly, these movies are hard to come by, Drive (2011) would be one of them for me, although there must be a more recent one I can't think of now.

cle
I suspect this is a broader problem with our new connectedness and the scale that enables, because I see similar issues in gaming, politics, etc. I think it’s a trend that is starting to get some pushback, eg with Scorsese decrying the “theme park” movies, panning of AAA games, growth of nationalism and protection of cultural identities, etc.
Alex3917
> His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.

If you look back at the best movies throughout history, a lot of them were made outside the Hollywood system. It's easy to think that movies today are worse than Apocalypse Now or Star Wars, while forgetting that those movies also couldn't get made in their day.

joeberon
I agree. While money has always been there, there hasn't been such intense "statistics" and micromanaging behind every decision. Directors could get away with doing many things out of the respect for the art rather than money. The systematised nature of it, this automated process of using statistics to automate creative decisions, is the worst part, because you can't escape it. In the past we had a base plot that must be interesting and make money, but there were so many avenues for being subversive on top of that. Now, everything is in service of the machine
cle
Money has always been there, I think it’s really more about connectedness. Audience sizes have exploded as population has grown and cultures have become more connected due to globalization and the Internet, so the TAM has exploded and led to the watering down of…everything, from movies to games to news & politics.
JKCalhoun
Too bad then, because if the audience has exploded then so too have the niche audience that would appreciate a film about, say, John von Neumann (ha ha, just to pick someone I just read an article about from HN).
nebula8804
I think this audience is there but they are watching these films on Netflix. I observed this phenomenon from 2019 to today when I got a monthly AMC movie pass that allows me to watch any three movies a week every week. What I observed even pre pandemic is that any film that is not a major established blockbuster (Superhero films, James bond, etc.) has little to no people coming out to see them. I further tried to understand this trend by writing a data collecting tool that leverages AMC's API to better understand who is coming out. It showed me that there are tons of empty screens for many smaller films going on. Finally to help control to see if this is a AMC thing, I also signed up for Cinemark(a competitor) and observed basically the same results.

It sucks because this harms directors I actually want to see succeed like Edgar Wright. Edgar is a big proponent of watching movies on the big screen so he designs his films to be primarily viewed on cinema screens and pushes for the longest release window he can get. Unfortunately, outside the cities, I observed little uptake for his latest film. :/

probably_wrong
I think the video doesn't go deep enough: the problem is not that movies teach the wrong lessons, but rather that the movies are so hyper-optimized for engagement and ROI that there's no room for nuance. He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money.

That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there. There are lots of good movies out there, but most people aren't watching them.

If you have the chance, I suggest everyone spend a couple weeks going to a "mystery movie night". Sure, sometimes you may end up watching "Blackhat" (or even worse, "Tracers"), but the good movies you'll end up also watching will make up for it.

jpgvm
This video is actually just one in a series of videos on the subject, you might want to watch the others if you want a more complete picture of his views.
bsenftner
Check out non-US filmmakers, there are some incredible films outside the Hollywood/Netflix cabal. For example, if you want nuance, check out "I am not an easy man", a French film, on Netflix at the moment, where a male chauvinist is transported to a world where females are the dominant gender, and he's forced into a frivolous, weak and sensitive male stereotype. That's just the setup, and it is multiple view worthy for all the nuance.
dazc
I enjoy watching French comedy dramas becuase the humour is incredibly subtle, unlike the majority of Hollywood films that are the exact opposite. I'll tolerate Jeniffer Aniston though.
dmitriid
> uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there

They kinda are. Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room, and movies are given money on the premise that they will make money. Edit: not just money. But shit-tons of money that can be milked from multiple angles for many years.

Already 10 years ago filmmakers were struggling to find funding for their projects. Birdman and Gravity were very close to not being made even they had Oscar-winning directors and stellar casts. It's significantly worse today.

chii
> movies are given money on the premise that they will make money

so what would be an alternative funding model?

A patreon or kickstarter like model where directors and stars are pre-paid via crowd funding?

A state sponsored funding model?

Non-profit model?

dmitriid
The original model where 1 big movie would pay for 6 break-even and 4 non-profitable movies :)

Too bad we may never return to that.

chii
If you could make 1 big movie that pays out a lot (enough to cover the "duds"), then why not just drop the "duds" and keep making those big movies?

the current status quo is a natural evolution of the prior status quo. That's why i think you have to have a new status quo by finding an alternative funding model.

I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).

I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision. This can't happen with a crowd funding model, since the crowd cannot directly manipulate the director (after all, the money is already paid, the director would not need to acquiesce to anyone but his own artistic direction!).

Whether these funding models can out-compete a studio big budget funding model remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath tho.

dmitriid
> the current status quo is a natural evolution of the prior status quo.

Indeed, unfortunately.

> I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).

This is a pipe dream. A few amateur movies managed to get funding this way, but that's about as far as you can go. Movies cost a lot. And even if the cast agrees to work for no money, there's still equipment, and sets, and all the people responsible for those, and editing, and music, and about a million other things.

> I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision.

There's also corruption and lack of transparency. France and Russia both subsidise movies heavily, and the results are ... mixed. In Russia award-winning directors and producers are still looking for sponsors to fund their movies because state money goes to some truly awful shit.

JKCalhoun
> Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room

Ahh, to remember the 1970's when a whole new crop of young American filmmakers were given the reigns to create some of the more original but still engaging content.

dmitriid
These days everyone is immediately drafted into <Franchise X Phase Y Spin Off Z Origin Story> :)

IIRC Marvel had trouble finding directors for their latest phase (or the one before that) because everyone was tied up doing franchise movies (or series).

JKCalhoun
> He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money.

So "franchise" is golden.

I suspect all of us can agree that in some alternate universe where the prequels were released before "Star Wars" ... there never would have been a franchise.

danielrpa
And don't forget that they are also optimized to the lowest common denominator of American and Chinese sensitivities.
Joeboy
I think I agree with the thrust of the video. My caveats would be:

1) When anybody dunks on "modern movies", they mean "modern movies with $>100m marketing budgets". Which is actually a small minority of modern movies.

2) The messaging has changed, but movies have always had terrible messaging in them.

Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.

Eddy_Viscosity2
There are also lots of modern movies sub-$100M budget that suck spectacularly. Many of them star Bruce Willis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd1eNS9HtXo
staticman2
James Bond is as generically "the best at everything" as you can get.

Whatever the villain is into, golf, fencing, gambling, etc. James Bond will challenge the villain at his hobby and beat him before the action even begins.

Edited to add: But the biggest example is probably Superman, just born super at everything.

Joeboy
That's more a description of 20th century Bond than Craig-era Bond. Contemporary Bond is a traumatized alcoholic who only passes a medical because M fixes his results. IIRC In Casino Royale he crashes his DB5 and is captured by his nemesis, who proceeds to beat his genitals with a knotted rope. That sort of thing doesn't happen to Captain Marvel (or Roger Moore).

It's admittedly a while since I've followed anything to do with Superman. I'm imagining he's undergone a similar reinvention, but I admit I'm guessing.

karpierz
> Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.

I think this is a bit of selective memory ala: https://xkcd.com/385/

Did you have particular movies in mind with this? The whole Marvel universe is riddled with male protagonists who are simply better than other people. That's the whole schtick that the Watchmen criticises.

Joeboy
Surely the whole point of Watchmen was that superheros aren't better than other people. For the last couple of decades cinema's been reinventing (male) superheroes as "complex characters" with flaws, moral weaknesses and questionable motivations.

Like you say, maybe I'm remembering selectively but I think that's less the case for Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman than it is for Iron Man, Superman or Batman.

Can you imagine Marvel greenlighting a female-led equivalent of Logan?

For what it's worth, I now regret saying anything, and will try to restrain myself from saying anything else.

darkerside
Atomic Blonde was a great example of a total badass female character who actually had to earn her ending
aaron695
None
moltke
That's an underrated comment, there are tons of good indie movies.
JeremyNT
> Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.

Do you watch many superhero movies? Because I feel like you must not.

Many of the characters are literal gods, and many more are just uncannily good at everything because of some hand wavey backstory.

Even the characters that start off "normal" tend to become awesome by simply being in the right place at the right time and being exposed to some external force (rather than through overcoming flaws or weaknesses on their own).

Joeboy
I think it's more about the stakes, obstacles, "psychic wounds" etc, than the actual superpowers. Being born with superpowers isn't that big a deal, if you're in a film where every other significant character also has superpowers.

Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.

IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.

At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.

Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.

yakubin
Another aspect which is often neglected in movies of today is character development. A character's backstory is either completely unknown, or is told instead of being shown, or is shown in a couple seconds, and then something happens to them that was aimed to supposedly instil some emotions in me as a viewer, but no, I don't care about this character. If they die, I guess they will be replaced by another character I don't care about. Example of this chasm between the old and the new is Moffat-era Doctor Who vs post-Moffat Doctor Who. This YouTube review shows it best: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMbZkR9vOrw>

Also, romantic scenes all look the same, completely generic. They're basically copy-pasted between movies. They're so flat and devoid of any genuine feeling I end up hitting the right arrow to skip them entirely.

Usually I don't have those issues with older movies (and movies of a couple selected directors still making good movies to this day).

t0bia_s
I don't mind that modern films are flat end empty, because then I have more time for watch tons of good old films and I do not have regrets that I miss something.

Last week I saw "Three colours" from Kieślowski. Absolutely amazing trilogy about liberté, égalité, fraternité.

JKCalhoun
Recently put on and enjoyed Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria."

I think I only saw one of the "color" films. (Was so depressing.)

justinator
Good pick- it’s to the point that I try to express my love of these movies and I just start sobbing. At once because of how beautiful these films are and also that I fear an audience for them no longer exist in a world where movies = The MCU.
88840-8855
The main criticism of this YouTube video is that the main character doesn't really have to put in any effort and has all those skills from the very beginning.

While I agree that this trope can make kids think they're special without trying in life (and that they will be a hero in the future), I think there have been similar tropes in the past.

Just take basic story writing of many old movies: There is always a hero that is living a boring or even sad life, often unsuccessful and unhappy. Suddenly, a "mentor" appears who takes our hero into this new magical world and teaches him the most amazing things in no time. Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, basically all Disney movies, even Sailor Moon.

That doesn't teach kids very positive things either: just wait for a mentor to come along and show you the way to become a hero, don't worry, you will be a hero because someone shows you the way.

So I don't see the development described in the YouTube video as dramatically, it has existed forever.

noduerme
No, think about Star Wars. Luke doesn't believe in the Force, doesn't believe Obi Wan is anything but a crazy old man. He has to come to his realization himself and then find the Force in himself. He isn't gifted with it. That truly is a big difference between the classic hero's journey and the newer 2010s films where people just have a magic power.

And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?

Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.

There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.

watwut
Luke Skywalker is shown as natural born talent. Which is why he can become Jedi despite being too old for it and emotional. His hero journey starts with right genetical inheritance.

> Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable.

I think he is just powerful rather then impossible to understand. Not that I am expert, but Greek gods don't come across to me as something alien. They are fairly human, emotional at times rational at others, political among themselves, but definitely too strong for actual humans to handle.

boomboomsubban
Luke Skywalker was just born with superpowers. Sure he had to learn to use the force properly, but there was still no other person in that story capable of using the force. Luke could have replaced either Wedge or Biggs, but they were not capable of replacing him.
em500
According to The Seven Basic Plots[1], all stories follow one of the archetypes

- Overcoming the Monster

- Rags to Riches

- The Quest

- Voyage and Return

- Comedy

- Tragedy

- Rebirth

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

TheOtherHobbes
This has been a standard trope for well over a century. It's not really about "being shown the way" because heroes still have to do some active hero-ing to get to the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

Movies and fiction are about moral lessons packaged into fantasies and escapism. If movies were relentlessly realistic no one would go to see them, because there would be nothing to see.

Even "gritty realism" isn't realistic. It's usually just the same trope populated with shady underworld characters and a flawed or outcast anti-hero instead of inspirational mentors.

carrolldunham
>the main character does not really have to work hard

Ah, so I don't even need to click the video to know this is going to be a nerd who is mad about Rey Skywalker.

bawolff
They didn't use rey skywalker as their only example or even their primary example.

I would also say that people dismissing other people's arguments without even listening to them is a major problem with internet.

bawolff
I think the difference is that the mentor might introduce them to the magical world, but its still up to the character what they want to do with it e.g. to quote the matrix "But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." And the decision as to what to do with it has consequences and changes them.

Or to use another example - gandalf might mentor frodo, but yet it always seems like frodo's accomplishments are his own and gandalf didn't really do all that much for him when all is said and done. Frodo is a hero and an interesting character, but i wouldn't want to be him.

Anyways i don't think the problem is lack of life lessons (even if they are lacking) its static characters and lack of stakes. Characters that were born ready are boring to watch. We like watching characters that change and adapt to circumstances whose choices are meaningful and consequential. The protagonist who was basically born with super powers, does not face a challenge and doesn't have to adapt their personality, is a boring character.

watwut
Nah. Superman, spiderman, hluk, any of these got skills by accident. Even karate kid which shown some training, shown imaginary low effort low time investment training. The typical action movie of my youth had guys winning all the fights for no reason other then that they are awesome. Audiences loved it. The past movies had enough of pure power fantasy or other "just gonna win" in it for the whole generation to drawn in it.

And not just American movies. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill were super famous and did basically nothing but that. They don't train, never ever, they are lazy as cool factor and are strongest guys most sharpest shooters around. Franch movies, fairly often the same thing. Random middle aged man thrown in situation and suddenly climbing and jumping roofs.

And series targetted at kids still show plenty of training. Lego ninja go, winx club, all show training or classroom scenes often.

bawolff
> Nah. Superman, spiderman, hluk, any of these got skills by accident

And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.

watwut
> And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.

There is no way for Hulk to ignore or reject the powers. Nor for superman or spiderman for that matter. Superman in particular is just born that way, full stop. And speaking about action movies that nope, no big deep choices there. Even in matrix, the choice is singular scene where main character picks the pill so that movie can happen.

And I liked Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies, so I have seen them multiple times and consequences for choices and actions are not the theme there at all.

I have also read Spiderman comic targeted at kids back then. Half the time he just reacts to what is going on around, not having much choice nor choice being theme beyond "Am I going to do the right thing or not" false choice. Ninja Turtles had training in them ... but also they are essentially magical turtles due to some experiments or what done on them.

Average movie and entertainment in 90ties just was not that deep.

noduerme
It's true it's not new. But when AI is mainly responsible for rewriting old scripts over and over, every 10 years, and telling children they're new movies, it may be missing out on the human elements that made those stories good the first time.
Beldin
> Even karate kid which shown some training, shown imaginary low effort low time investment training.

The point of his training is that the moves have completely become muscle memory/second nature. I have no clue how long that would take, but it would be significantly more than "low time investment".

Note also that (1) he claimed to have had karate training before; (2) after hebuilds up the needed muscle memory, training continues to teach him when to use what muscle memory.

watwut
It takes over summer or something like that. He is 17 when movie starts and tournament he wins is when is 18 birthsday gift. Bulk of training is housework chores. No, you cant do housework for few months and emerge tournaments winning fighter out of it. That is literally plot of first Karate Kid.

However, it is kid/teenage fantasy. Which is fine! But not some kind of hard work message movie.

hackerfromthefu
2-3 years of regular training is a good guideline for the movements to become autonomic in real-time situations with fluent synchrony situational context, for someone reasonably coordinated at the start.
watwut
The movie is about becoming good enough to win tournament against people who trained continuously for years.
akemichan
> I think the difference is that the mentor might introduce them to the magical world, but its still up to the character what they want to do with it e.g. to quote the matrix "But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." And the decision as to what to do with it has consequences and changes them.

And in most cases they accept blindly, otherwise there's no story. Madoka Magica is one of the few stories that I know where this trope is broken by the characters questioning the decision.

edpichler
Does anyone else feel that you may know why new movies sucks, but you cannot talk about it?
sniglom
Yes.
beeboop
I see this problem more with TV than movies
None
None
spywaregorilla
No?
version_five
As another post mentioned, this really only applies to big budget blockbusters. Just to summarize what I've observed:

1. Every movie is basically the "Mattel-Mars Bar quick energy chocobot hour" at this point, basically just an empty ad

2. Studios are currently falling all over themselves to show how ideologically correct they are

y3sh
"Ideologically Correct" is the perfect description I've been looking for
bendergender
Wait till you hear about the history of shows like Transformers, HeMan, Gundam, etc. Media has more or less been an ad for 50+ years at this point, that's hardly a new phenomena.
a257
> Basically what this means is they are teaching people really sht lessons now, and if this sort of thing continues for too long, it's going to produce an entire generation of shtty people.

Out of curiosity, how much influence do movies/tv shows have in shaping society? Could it be that the seemingly casual link between movies and culture be opposite? Or, in other words:

B (bad movies) = "this sort of thing continues for too long"

S (shtty people) = "produce an entire generation of shtty people"

B -> S is claimed in the video, is !B || S always true? Could it be B <- S instead? B <-> S?

makeitdouble
I’d see this as an already well established field we call either “propaganda” or “advertisement.

No need to go real deep, with a “follow the money” approach, the amounts that are spent im product placement and effort to shape narratives through work of art speak for themselves.

throwmeariver1
This gets pondered everywhere but product placement was worse in the beginning of television like the "The Colgate Comedy Hour" and it's abbreviations from Coke etc. or the characters from sponsors directly integrated into the plot of a tv show. Imagine your favorite character going into the kitchen making a coffee and the coffee salesperson comes in and makes a 5-minute pitch. You can say about modern advertisement what you want but it was way more subliminal in the beginning.
makeitdouble
I hear you. France had to pass rulings limiting the frequency you can say a product name on tv.

Advertisement and propaganda have always been the bread and butter of tvs (and to a lesser extent movies). The whole industry grew leaps and bounds during the last century, yet people still dismiss it as low brow, or only care about images/narratives influence when it’s children looking at boobs or games that are supposed to be too violent.

On getting better or worse, I think it got more sophisticated as the reach increased and the market for attention became more competitive. All in all I don’t think the core of it changes much, the army is still heavily supporting war movies and games to the same extent for instance, the landscape just got more diverse making it less prominent.

carapace
This is something I ponder pretty often, and I think the best you can say is that there are causal loops.

Certainly, planned media campaigns seem to cause (in some but not all cases) large shifts in mass behavior. (E.g. Bernays getting women to smoke cigarettes[1], or pedestrians being removed from the streets to make way for automobiles by deriding them as "jaywalkers" and then criminalizing the until-then ancient and universal custom[2].)

On the other hand, as much as I don't like to "blame the user" I can't help but feel like we have personal responsibility for our behavior. E.g. on the individual level it feel to me like a "cop out" to say, e.g. advertising made me eat this junk food and get fat (or whatever.)

In any event, if you want to study this sort of thing using formal symbolic systems, you have to use systems that can handle causal loops, i.e. Cybernetics: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf

[1] I view Edward Bernays as a mass murderer for his largely successful efforts in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Tobacco

[2] The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM

benreesman
In general I’ll watch anything the Drinker recommends (I’ll never stop being grateful that’s he got to me to give the Expanse a second try for example).

With that said, there are lot of fantastic movies getting made, they’re just not big budget. You could watch nothing but stuff Pattinson (to name a single example) has been in over the last 10 years and have a, uh, good time.

I personally think that these days the most effective way to watch great films is to pick actors that are only in stuff you like. Some actors are extremely picky about what they’ll work on, and that’s great.

whycome
So, I should give the Expanse a second try? ....

My biggest issue these days is that there isn't actual development within the world created. Superman falls for Lois lane, not because of some sort of event or circumstance that we experience on screen, but because they're 'supposed to get together'. Or it's also bad when movies rely on a wider generalized context rather than actually developing something within the world.

dvdkon
The Expanse isn't a "remake" of a decades old comic book storyline, quite a few movies aren't. I like movies that try to fit into an overarching "mythos", but that's just one particular approach to storytelling.
y3sh
The last season was a let-down to me, weirdly felt like everyone involved just stopped caring.
benreesman
I mean this is obviously very subjective, but to my tastes the Expanse is a must watch. Almost everyone I’ve asked bounced off the first few episodes.

The Drinker’s review is a pretty good place to get a sense of whether or not it’s your cup of tea.

I have at least one or two friends who had to kind of power through the first 4-6 episodes before abruptly becoming fanatics. It grabbed me on episode 4 and pretty much never let up. It’s got soft episodes like anything, but I don’t think there’s a soft season.

darkerside
I was intrigued by the first few episodes, but found myself not caring towards the end of season 1. Is this just not for me?
psyc
I actually made it through the first 4 or maybe 5 seasons, and was pretty bored and underwhelmed the whole time. I found all of the characters except Amos and Bobbie flat and (unintentionally) off-putting. Unless I'm missing something, the plot and premises are nothing special. I consider myself a big fan of many TV drama series, as well as sci-fi, I just put this one near the bottom of my list. I just don't get what's so interesting about it. For reference, I consider (2000s) Battlestar Galactica to be an astounding masterpiece and among the greatest TV series of any genre, along every dimension you could measure a show by. I guess there really is no accounting for taste.

I've changed my mind before. I initially found Breaking Bad unwatchable, but eventually came around to thinking it's very good.

999900000999
What a great video!

On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series.

Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision.

The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a fairly unique reason. Back when I lived in LA I basically went out with this girl who knew she was a model and I wasted a ton of time and money on her.

When I moved to Chicago, I met a dorky awkward girl, who became my first real girlfriend. This is priceless dating advice, go for that dorky awkward girl that actually likes you.

Of course this really pissed a lot of people off, so they basically got rid of that story arc for the last movie. Looking at the entire series, I really think someone at Disney got uncomfortable with interracial dating, and thus Finn ends up making no sense as his two previous love arcs need to be eliminated by the last movie. This is understandable because even in America I've met people who are very uncomfortable with it, and Disney needs to distribute these movies to a global audience.

That might actually be the root of the problem, you have to make a movie that goes out of its way to keep everybody comfortable. In various countries showing LGBT plotlines are a big no-no, so you have reports coming out of Disney that they've cut these at the last moment from various movies.

The moment you have to make a movie that's okay for every single person, you end up creating these devoid visual spectacles. As in, most action movies are just a bunch of explosions and music. You can replace all the dialogue with gibberish and still get the idea of what happened.

I was trying to watch Free Guy and had to turn it off 10 minutes in. Stop with the freaking music for a second and let people speak.

However, other countries are still making real movies. I think a big part of the Korean wave is you don't have as much pandering to every single possible audience in K-pop dramas. Even then, I've had friends post that the subtitles are often toned down. Edit: Language Reactor is a great Chrome plugin which offers alternative subtitles as well as context. It's a great tool for language learning as well

I can't imagine ever going to a movie theater again, congratulations Disney You've ruined cinema.

Maybe I'll put one of these mediocre movies on in the background while I do other things, but they're not worthy of my undivided attention.

zarkov99
Start Wars, at least episode III, meaning the first one, is clearly structured around the hero's journey, a story archetype that has been around since time immemorial, in every culture on earth. A story that old and enduring must resonate deeply with something deep and true about the human condition and a talented director cannot help but be successful by retelling it skillfully. Many modern movies eschew any such ballast . Instead the weapons of choice are technical prowess, amygdala hacking and the parroting of the ideological fad of the day. Needless to say nothing inspiring comes out of these efforts and in a generation no one will watch these things.
micromacrofoot
yeah I think the bright side is that foreign film can shine now; it's amazing how korea has been entering the american zeitgeist regularly now, that’s no small feat
spywaregorilla
I would say 8 is by far the worst of the generally terrible new trilogy.

8 abandons pretty much everything from 7 and then tries to make a large sub plot about how the real evil is the oligarchical weapon vendors funding both sides. Ffs, the star wars universe has a faction self identifying as the evil dark side. It's not the place for his kind of thing.

causality0
A lack of moral subtlety is also hurting modern productions. I nearly cringed out of my skin when Peacemaker and Resident Alien managed to have blunt anti-anti-masker scenes in the same week. I really don't need to see my own opinions fed back to me out of a baby food jar.
y3sh
How about the speech at the end of Falcon and Winter Soldier?
causality0
I'm pretty sure I had that blocked out in mental self-defense.
lordnacho
For me the noticeable thing about modern movies is the pace. It's like something must happen all the time, if there isn't something moving or someone talking, it isn't a modern movie. I feel like been conditioned to not be able to watch older movies anymore, my brain is just like "huh why isn't something happening?".
Krasnol
Those cuts!

I know I grow older and my brain probably has some issues with that too but my god, there are too many cuts. Even in (US made) documentaries they introduce this artificially creating fast pace where there is none.

I got a headache from watching Star Trek Discovery which pretty much was peak madness.

JKCalhoun
There was this film called "2001: A Space Odyssey". You won't be able to stand it.
vidanay
The Gods Must Be Crazy has even less.
mcphage
I love that movie, it’s just wonderful.
toast0
I watched the Gods Must Be Crazy recently... I don't recall any long drawn out scenes with no dialogue? But maybe I took a micronap.
EamonnMR
Gotta keep the audience from looking at their phones.
Strawhorse
Juxtapose this with a movie like Lost in Translation, where as much of the progression comes from just observing characters and actions as comes from dialogue and interaction. That movie was a modern masterpiece and spits in the face of most Hollywood junk.
ZYinMD
I have a different problem with the modern movies - modern people have pretty much seen everything, but still ask "show me something I haven't seen before", so movies try their best to create "novelties", and end up with crazy plot twists that make the story worse. But then the novelty wears off quickly as we've seen everything yet again, so movies have to find newer and crazier shit to keep us entertained, and deviate father away from the best stories. Sooner or later we'll run out of stimulus, meanwhile our children are exposed to crazy shit from day 1.
TipiKoivisto
I agree 100%. A movie doesn't have to be great, but it should be different.

I made a short film and even the people who didn't get/like the jokes said: "At least it was different and not boring."

BTW, you can watch the film in https://youtu.be/LkclVXofHbU

Markoff
I dunno, I watch couple hundreds movies per year for decades and still Manchester by the sea (2016) or Jagten (2012) hit me hard without any crazy plot twists.

It also helps to switch away from Hollywood, lot of great Iranian movies for instance.

jasperry
I think what you're getting at is that novelty is being sought as a (poor) substitute for real substance. Give me a movie made by someone who has really thought about an aspect of the human condition and explores it from their own point of view, and it will have true originality and keep you riveted, even if the theme has been treated thousands of times. There aren't that many different themes, but they are inexhaustible if treated well.

Movies bore us not because of lack of novelty, but because they're just tropes stitched together to fit a formula rather than representing a real creative endeavor.

bryanrasmussen
There are various schools of art criticism that argue that the purpose of art is not to teach morality. I've just noticed in the last few years that the teaching of morality through the arts seems to have come back into vogue, with concomitant disciplining of those that are deemed immoral, but the funny thing with moralizers is the absolute certainty with which they believe that the purpose of art is to teach morality, their morality, and that they do not seem to have any awareness when they talk that there may be other viewpoints regarding art.
darkerside
I think the purpose of stories as art is to explore morality, not necessarily to teach it. Find the conflicted decisions people are forced to make in extreme circumstances and follow the result. And in the end, we all learn from that together, so maybe there is teaching after all, but not in a prescriptive way.
spywaregorilla
I would go as far as to say movies teaching morality are just bad and tiresome when the moral concept is obvious. Art is most interesting, imo, when it takes a position on something that matters or isn't obvious to those not thinking about it.

Birdman still stands out to me as an amazing film. It's messages are so specific and consumable, and it had something to say that felt somewhat novel.

tomohawk
There used to be 2 categories: character driven and plot driven.

Character driven movies require good writing, which is in short supply. Plot driven movies - you just need a cool plot idea, and then throw in some actors to service the plot. The characters personalities morph to suit whatever the plot demands.

With the rise of woke, a different category has experienced a resurgence: ideology driven. It's kind of like plot driven, but instead of characters being malleable in service to some plot, they are malleable in service to woke ideology. This makes the characters unrelatable and inhuman.

hwers
My take is slightly different than what I'm reading here. I think movies is somewhat similar to engineering in a way. There's a ton of brainpower and talent actually required to come up with innovative and striking stories and screenplays etc. And I believe the limited reserve of people with this talent aren't given the fuck you money needed to achieve it.

There's basically a talent shortage and the modern culture in Hollywood no longer boosts the innovators to the top as they did in previous decades.

smallerfish
Ehh, I think he's asking movies to do too much. It's not the responsibility of hollywood to teach cultural mores.

I do think blockbuster movies are (perhaps) increasingly just glorified cartoons, though, and Marvel/Disney are probably significantly to blame. Is fighting _really_ that interesting? Does the wire pull _have_ to be used in every fight? Why are big dumb CGI animals so popular? Why does every small CGI animal make the same wuk wuk wuk noise? Why does every large CGI animal snort like a buffalo?

spywaregorilla
I liked this video. With the glaring exception of wandavision. Characters in that series are constantly telling her that what she is doing is wrong. There is no ambiguity that it's an evil selfish thing she is doing. It's also unintentional and subconscious because she can't control her powers and frankly she is weak. Her sacrifice is the loss of her children and husband because she recognizes she has to restore freedom to the innocents. This part of the analysis felt extremely unfair.
y3sh
In the early part of my journey into Wandavision I had no idea why things were the way they were, what was real, or what was the point of what I was watching. It was very unsettling to not be able to tell what was real, even in my reality, and for that I LOVED IT. The last time that happened to me was probably the first Matrix in theater.
spywaregorilla
Yes the beginning was fantastic. Such a shame about the big budget ending.
netcan
Fun rant.

IMO, much of what The Drinker describes is just plain old bad writing, but currently it's a lame writing in the style or George RR Martin or whatever is modern. It's not the style that sucks, it's the writing.

GRRM makes for an easy example. He wrote the novels for GoT's wonderful early seasons. Other people wrote the later seasons. We can compare. Both told morally ambiguous stories that played with fantasy motifs, but with the confusing twist. The handsome knight is a villain. The good lord gets killed. etc. This is the style of both early and late seasons, the late seasons just suck.

In GRRM's writing, you follow characters make fucked up, horrible and evil decisions... but motivations make sense. You understand why." In late seasons, that breaks down.

I believe a good writer could have hit all the "Rey Skywalker" identity waypoints and tied it into a story that doesn't* suck. The sucky writers could have written a simple, New Hope style hero's journey where Rey overcomes internal and external obstacles... and that story could have still sucked.

Fiction writing can have almost any moral take. Confusion, nihilism, certainty. The world can be just, the characters immoral. The world can be cruel, the heros can be moral.

In short, it's totally possible to take the lamest of moral positions and write a great story around it. Possible, but not guaranteed. Look at Ayn Rand.

y3sh
I like that the drinker doesn't criticize without offering how to fix it, e.g. the drinker fixes Rey Skywalker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5BL6d7MOMY
Bancakes
On the other hand, we have movies you don't need context to watch; don't need to care or emotionally invest - just sit back and passively enjoy the sounds and colors. Like a 3 hour long cigar.

We need movies like this because a lot of people have enough drama and action in real life, and need audiovisual media to wind down and stop thinking

If I wanted to take a lesson, I could read the plot summary - it's the same information. For a 3 hour movie, I could resume all of Dostoevsky's works.

MontyCarloHall
How much of “why modern X sucks” is attributable to survivorship bias? There were plenty of horrible movies/music/art/etc. made in years past; today, we only watch and remember the ones that were good enough to survive the test of time.
the_doctah
OK, but those weren't the ones setting box office records either. The new Star Wars were terrible, still made truckloads of money, and will also be remembered 50 years from now, just because of the franchise.
aliswe
To be honest the author makes a pretty solid case (albeit opinionated) spanning over multiple clips - its not possible to use survivorship bias against most of his arguments IMO.
ekianjo
most good movies of this decade still suck compared to good movies 20 or 30 years ago.
hwers
This argument doesn't really hold up if you look at e.g. the year 1999 compared to pretty much any year in say the last decade. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40538583. Choose any year and pick the 'survivors' of that year (the top 10 or so movies) and will you really argue that those are better than that list?
pharmakom
I find much better content on TV than in movies these days. My favourite format is probably the mini-series, where a self contained story is told properly, with no openings for a second season or franchise opportunity.

One of the best and strangest TV shows I have watched is The Leftovers. If you want something different check it out. Season 3 is sublime.

Barrin92
Horrible video in my opinion. Essentially the author demands that works of art put on display a particular moral message he agrees with. i.e. that characters need to thrive through hard work, determination, kind of "American Dream - the movie" or something.

But art is not in the business of selling didactic moral lessons, enforcing Protestant work ethics or what else have you. Art should primarily stand on artistic merits. Most of the movies in the video fail on that front as well but not because they don't engage in teaching folk morality.

Paraphrasing the end of the video: "movies teach sketchy life lessons, like prioritizing one's own happiness over other people's freedom[...]"

From an artistic standpoint there is nothing at all wrong with this, in fact putting a character like this into a framing of a hero makes for a significantly more interesting premise than much else I've seen in the cinema.

dudul
As far as I'm concerned we could stop making movies right now (or 10 years ago really). We would still have enough great movies to watch for several life times.

As a side note, I strongly recommend checking out Drinker's books - published under his real name Will Jordan. While I was skeptical at first, I have to say I really enjoyed them.

pvaldes
They should put an epilepsy warning in this video.

Bombing the viewer with one second sequences of random films for the entire video is really annoying

bawolff
While people might find that annoying, is it actually an epilepsy trigger?
lotsofpulp
Extremely quick cuts are a staple of YouTube videos that my 10 year old nieces and nephews seem to enjoy watching. Very annoying to me and a good filter of the part of a YouTube to avoid.
dudul
I believe it may partly be to avoid copyright strikes.
gsich
The audio is what is important.
omnicognate
I agree it's not very pleasant to watch and this style is often abused, but it serves a real purpose in this video. He's making broad points about movies as whole in two different timeframes and comparing between them. When he's discussing a particular movie the shots illustrate which movie (and in many cases which parts of it) he's referring to. When making broad statements about whole clases of movies the shots provide examples of the points being made.

Using shots like this is much more information-dense than verbally listing a load of titles and scene descriptions and triggers the viewer's memory much more effectively. Keeping the clips very short allows more examples to be packed in and also protects against intellectual property complaints. (The need for the latter is highly regrettable but a daily reality for youtubers.)

Strawhorse
We can blame a lot of the dumbing down on Hollywood's kowtowing to China
fullshark
Every example here is a female protagonist also, I think it's also partially kowtowing to feminist cultural critics who are vocal online and are particularly sensitive to perceived slights.
Strawhorse
That's ironic, because China hates strong female role models or protagonists in movies due to an endemically sexist culture
fullshark
I think the Mulan update was a huge flop in China FWIW, so maybe Disney tried to thread the needle there and failed. New Star Wars movies also I think didn't do well there.

https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/why-china-hates-disney-mu...

> The most fundamental flaw, most felt, was that Disney’s new heroine starts out from childhood already equipped with superhero-like abilities, thanks to her extraordinary reserves of “qi,” the force that she cultivates and controls to excel as a fighter.

> Turning her into a superhero removes Mulan’s everywoman appeal, and leaves her with no room to grow as a character, huge swathes of Chinese viewers said.

Basically the exact criticism of the youtube video interestingly enough

Strawhorse
I think the new Mulan fail was due to some social media shitstorm about the lead actress or something; the spastic Chinese internet trolls had a feeding frenzy on something she said. At the same time, the movie got trashed in the West for being, well, shit.
fullshark
In any case I think the macro issue is trying to placate too many audiences with their own agendas (hardcore fanboys, Chinese censors, feminist cultural agitators, etc) instead of telling a good story with interesting characters, at least for the cinema the video maker is focused on (big budget IP).
Strawhorse
Tell that to Hollywood, man. A lot of their movies now are being passed by Chinese censors first with the domestic market somewhat of an afterthought. Interestingly, though, China hasn't produced a single decent movie in a decade or two, and they certainly don't give a fuck about the foreign market. But I agree with what you said there.
fmajid
It's mostly because Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and eking out diminishing returns from strip-mining the Star Wars or Marvel universes.

The odd thing is, quality video production has become much more affordable with the end of film and rise of mirrorless video cameras and NLE consoles running on commodity PCs. SFX has gone up in price but is not required for every movie, so you would expect an explosion of creativity, not the industry hunkering down around a limited number of franchises and sequels.

jsz0
It's probably been 5 years now since I willingly watched a movie. I've been dragged to a few not by preference which I was bored to death by. I don't want to be a Debbie downer or come off as a snob so I try to make reasonable excuses why I won't watch a movie but the truth is I think most of them are stupid as hell as I generally look down on people who waste their time watching lots of TV and movies. There are better things to do with your life.
gyozapump
I suspect younger people generally understand this and watch streaming shows instead. A creative who wants to tell a deep nuanced story would prefer 10 episodes where they get more time and probably better terms.

People lamenting the death of movies don't get this. The good stuff is still out there, it's just in a different format.

Movies are now more occasions to go out to the theatre. They have to be mass appeal, family friendly, nothing too complex.

moltke
Shows are not movies and streaming even more so.
durnygbur
I'd rather announce the end of American cinematography. It's entirely product placement pulp, preceded by numerous ads when displayed in cinema or the internet, and any form of sharing them on the internet oftentimes implies a vicious strike of copyright predators. Shut down this industry already.
alexashka
Modern movies suck because the big studios spent all their efforts to monopolize the movie market, but it turns out you're not competing with other movie studios, you're competing with all other possible forms of entertainment.

So they're kind of screwed - the bean counters won with their usual barely legal tactics, but rent seeking only works when you've monopolized a need, not when you've monopolized a nice to have.

They're still profitable because there is still a generation of people whose routine is to sit in front of a screen and watch something every evening. They're not unlike lifelong smokers - too far gone to ever quit. As those folks pass away, so will the netflix/movie industry business model.

Gatsky
I disagree that one learns anything important from a (non-documentary) movie. Movies are an experiential but non-interactive art form that resists internalisation. At best they make you feel a certain way for a short while, in my experience.
Strawhorse
Movies (non-documentary) can moot and champion whole ideologies, psychologies, and philosophies, for example Fight Club (nihilism), Logan's Run (progressivism, anti-establishmentism), Lost in Translation (existentialism, contemporary anomie), Magnolia (existentialism, fugue) etc. I suggest you broaden your viewing.
Gatsky
My viewing is pretty broad, I’ve seen these movies except Magnolia. What you are describing is the placing of a movie in a cultural context. This is criticism, not learning on an individual level. For example, take Mulan. I can generate a feminist counter-critique that the new Mulan is in fact better because women are born with special qualities men don’t have, and often are superior when given equal opportunities. This isn’t a lesson the movie teaches however, it’s academic bloviating.

I mean I think actual existentialist philosophers would laugh if you tried to tell them that Lost in Translation is an existentialist movie. Also I think you mean ennui not anomie.

Strawhorse
I think we were doing well until you brought in some pap like Mulan.
Gatsky
That’s the example in the original video.
mikaeluman
Completely agree with this guy. New movies inevitably seem to teach strange lessons that make you uneasy and kind of feel bad when you leave the cinema or turn of the screen.

Superhero movies used to be about growth. Yet now it's more often than not the case that the hero was simply born awesome. Completely uninteresting.

Politics also creeps into movies in a disconcerted way. Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny, but about some strange mix of feminism and animal rights. I think. Batman has to see Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys. And of course Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men" when they get horribly assassinated in gruesome ways by a psychopath - as if murdering the mayor such that his now fatherless son finds him should receive equal attention to some drug deal gone wrong.

The latest Bond movie of course had to kill Bond. Something that should just never happen. And then we have to watch this extremely annoying supposed new 007 get an insane amount of screen time even though she is a transparent, vapid character.

deanCommie
> Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny,

It's a massive universe and there's been six movies about this theme already. Why retread old themes instead of trying something new? By the way, I am NOT defending the new trilogy - it is absolutely awful, but it's not awful BECAUSE it's about feminism and animal rights (also, it isn't, it's still about totalitarianism and tyranny).

> Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys.

Again, there have been anywhere between 9-10 batman movies depending on how you count of him beating up bad guys. Why do you need more? Why not try something new and really interrogate the psychopathy of the character, and the realization he might go through which is that beating up bad guys isn't the best use of time for a billionaire.

> Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men"

Did you miss the part where her mother and her best friend were both essentially sex slaves that got choked to death by the italian mafia? If anyone has a case and a grudge against "rich white men", it's probably her.

Also, the whole movie, is about how rich corrupt people let the whole city down.

I haven't seen the new Bond movie, but if they actually had the balls to kill him, that's tremendous progress.

Why are you so resistant to any change?

zabzonk
I've often thought that the look of 1950s films (and of other decades, I guess) was the result of a reinforcing positive feedback loop between film (and TV) and society.

If this is the case, what enables us to break out of the loop?

PS I really like The Drinker.

throwaway4220
off topic but is there a tool that just lets me read a YouTube videos transcript?
aembleton
Yes - https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Dnuqp4_K7ik
jdougan
Yes. Youtube Comment Search and youtube-dl (and others) can do so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30566470

YeGoblynQueenne
Don't forget that Anakin Skywalker was special because he carried more midi-chlorians since birth. He is, after all, "The Chosen One".

So he, too, is "born that way".

cptnapalm
He was gifted at birth, true. However, this hero does fail. In fact, he fails so spectacularly, he becomes the villain.
creata
The author's thesis is that there is a trend of moral decline in movies, and that this induces a corresponding moral decline in society. This is a very old and boring argument, and the author doesn't introduce any insight. All he does is bring up a few newer movies he doesn't like and a few older movies he likes, and then vaguely warn us about how this will lead to the downfall of civilization.

To the people who like this submission: why?

thanatos519
I watched "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" with my kid recently, and it was still awesome.

I'm struggling to recall the last time I watched a 'modern' movie. I have even downloaded some but I always seem to have something better to do with my time.

Oh. Come to think of it, it might have been "Star Trek II: The Type Casting of Benedict Cumberbatch".

cheaprentalyeti
A quick note: this is part of a series of "Why Modern Movies Suck" with different subtitles by the same person.
Markoff
TLDW crap movies teach us crap lessons

I skimmed through the video which it seems to use as example 4-5 crap movies

I'd like to see this video using Falling down, American beauty, Fight club, Se7en as examples, the first three among the movies which formed me the most and taught me valuable lessons.

ComradePhil
Cry me a river! Why are adults in the west (I'm not talking about 18 year olds or even 30 year olds... I mean proper adults, like 35+) watching superhero movies clearly written and performed for kids? I do understand nostalgia but I really don't think westerners understand the concept of growing up. Like, at some point, it has to be like

"Yeah, I enjoyed this so much when I was 6 and I can see why a kid me would love this... but I am 36 now and while the actual content does remind me the great carefree time when I was 6, it no longer appeals to me as a person I am today... because it is so far removed from the things I know and care about that I can't really relate".

When a grown ass man excitedly talks about a new kids movie that came out, I really don't know how to react without cringing. It's way too common and I've had to join to not look like an outcast at times and sit through terrible forgettable overdone movies. Please stop.

bendergender
Why are people watching things they enjoy? Because they enjoy them.

Stop trying to be the arbiter of what other people enjoy. I'm sure you have some tastes in media others would find cringeworthy, but we're all better if we recognize that taste in media is highly personal and we should let people enjoy things.

ComradePhil
> Why are people watching things they enjoy?

No. Why are adults enjoying things clearly meant for kids? And I am not talking about a few adults. Is there some widesperad development disorder that is prevalent?

I'm concerned because kids are wreckless, short-sighted, immature. They are kids and that is expected... but if they are in put in positions of power just because they have aged physically, isn't it dangerous and should be addressed? Even if they were not in positions of power, they can still vote and influence policies... which sometimes have consequences in another part of the world... so I think it is important to discuss.

I have no problems with personal freedom. In fact it is personal freedom which reveals things like this making it visible and hence easier to analyze and solve.

If you are watching such movies yourself, I don't want to engage with you for obvious reasons. Go watch your superhero movies where the lead character is played by a kid half your age and let the adults discuss this.

bendergender
> Why are adults enjoying things clearly meant for kids?

There are many potential reasons. Abnegation, power fantasy, sense pleasure, social cohesion (being able to discuss with your peers what's in the zeitgeist). I could spend a paragraph on each of these and why they are reasonable for adults.

Your attitude is narrow minded, and you've resorted to insults to try to make your point on several occasions, rather than having an investigative, curious mind. You've drawn your conclusion before interrogating the details.

Academic research into games has identified 8 or nine broad categories of why people play games, and I'm sure there's something similar for movies.

ComradePhil
> Abnegation, power fantasy, sense pleasure

And all of these don't sound problematic to you for adults to be aiming for?

The world is exactly the way it is. Children have the opportunity to grow in it and develop the possibility to imagine something better... the reason for which is that if the world changes in the favor of their imagination, we will have people who already intuitively have a frame of mind to navigate it and develop it in that direction. But once you are adults, you have responsibilities to keep the world working well, not keeping on imagining childish fantasies. That's for kids. It's dangerous for people with important responsibilities and power to be doing that.

> you've resorted to insults

You'd only perceive them as insults if you can only imagine me through your own imagination of other people... and I believe because your world is completely imaginary, you feel disagreeing with each other is insulting.

"mY SuPeRhErO is StRoNgEr", "nO MiNe iS". "MOM"

The above was teasing. The rest of my comment is not. Imagine the most serious person you have encountered... and try to read this in that voice. That is how I am talking to you.

Also, when I say teasing, I mean as one would tease a kid... as an adult, I would expect myself to be teased as a kid... something that I would potentially have found offensive as a kid have but not get offended now because I have long outgrown that phase.

> You've drawn your conclusion before interrogating the details.

Isn't that even a little bit interesting to you? Have you ever tried being curious enough to find why adults would be that way?

That is what being an adult means. You optimise yourself for the world that is... while enabling the kids to be fantacizing safely and playfully. It is dangerous to be fantacizing when you are potentially capable enough to try to impose your fantacies into the world.

bendergender
Hey, I'm out. You are too intense to have a nice conversation with. You seem really angry about this, maybe it's worth interrogating that.

Can't have a conversation with someone who is just yelling.

ComradePhil
> You seem really angry about this

Well, as I have tried to indicate before, only the words are mine, the tone and emotion you attribute to them while reading are entirely yours and are limited by your experience with people. If you are still watching superhero movies with engagement, it is very likely that you are attributing the emotions of those overblown characters to people you encounter.

There is no anger and definitely no yelling here.

cryptica
The monetary system rewards compliance and unethical conduct so that may be why many modern movies lack creativity and moral lessons. The people who have the money to fund movies don't have the taste nor creativity to choose good scripts to fund.
stiltzkin
ESG funds is the worst that had happened to the American entertaiment industry:

https://comicsgate.org/2021/10/30/ethan-van-sciver-is-right-...

jl2718
You’re blowing my mind.

“So, it’s all just government money?”

“Always has been.”

Click.

dustingetz
the english second language market is several times larger than the english market, so mega franchises like Marvel really need to keep it simple. a lesson for entrepreneurs as well.
jeltz
There is no need to keep it simple for our sake, we can follow complex dialogue just fine using subtitles.
Strawhorse
These foreign cinemas have their own industries. Plus, Marvel as an entity has been around for years before they started making those crap movies. It's just hollywood kowtowing to other countries for more money.
smitty1e
Art has to bespeak truth to be worthy of the name.

Postmodernism scuttles truth, prepending a grade of 'F' to the word 'art'.

kwinten
Cringe
hackerfromthefu
And lately adds ridiculous over pc-ness to become phart!
eezing
I never thought Star Wars episodes 1-3 were all that terrible. I struggled to make it through the latest batch.
hackerfromthefu
Omg Disney completely ruined it - couldn't believe 7 and never going to watch any after that. Ever.
antattack
As the movies become more and more realistic, people and morals and no longer black and white.
threesmegiste
Modern generation wants sucks
noduerme
I kind of appreciate the gamer-style review of Mulan, just, like, not having as much difficulty or leveling up in the live-action version. Putting it in that way makes a meaningful point and is something that can actually be fixed. What can't be fixed, unfortunately, is Disney's enslavement to China. The classic Disney narrative was at one time was aimed at selling the American Dream. Which, bullshit as it may have turned out for most pepole, at least vaunted (can you use that as a verb?) the advancement of the underdog and, like, bootstrapping peasants or immigrants into responsible leadership by their talents. (It was a Universal film, but "An American Tail" was the only movie my parents took us to see TWICE in the theater when I was a kid). I think you could trace the decline in meaningful storytelling to a political posture in China that is deeply at odds with anything that smacks of peasant uprisings, or power to the people, which in spite of its corporate undertones in production Hollywood writers actually used to somewhat be allowed to champion. Remember that even though these are huge multinational corporations, most actual screenwriters were for all functional purposes extreme liberals or communists up until they were killed and replaced with regurgitating AI bots in the mid-2000s.
bawolff
> I think you could trace the decline in meaningful storytelling to a political posture in China that is deeply at odds with anything that smacks of peasant uprisings, or power to the people

The first disney mulan is a story about a girl who overcame discrimination and gender roles to come into a position of great honour to the state.

Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.

noduerme
>> Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.

True, and fair. I didn't mean to cast Disney as some kind of revolutionary force for anti-authoritarianism at any point in its history. But the Joan of Arc myth means different things to different people, and it's inherently dangerous to the status quo even if it's used for the glory of the state. Such a legend could not be told now in China, because there's too much room for subversion in the individual's self-empowerment.

_tik_
I think this argument is overstretching into a political argument. The live action Mulan movie is consider a flop in China. The Chinese audience hate it. It is more successful in Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Disney remove one of main major male character to be aligned with the MeeToo movement. For the Animation version the Chinese complained for their foreign looking character and it is too different from myth. China love Kung Fu panda. The find kung fu panda show a sincere love to Chinese culture without over trying too be a chinese.
zzzbra
first time I’ve actually understand some of the Last Jedi hate
WaxedChewbacca
None
newguy999
None
jsnodlin
None
mrjay42
Like any other thing: Accessing quality requires effort.

If you just eat what is being served for you, all prepared and already chewed up -> it's your responsibility.

Good movies exist. Just dig a little deeper. And maybe also, don't just watch US stuff.

ZeroGravitas
This just doesn't ring true to me, at all.

Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?

The biggest film in history was "Birth of a Nation" until it was replaced by "Gone with the Wind", "Star Wars" may have been a rebellion against a vaguely Nazi empire, but it was still about hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars.

Overall, the trajectory seems fairly positive. The good old days were pretty crappy and that was reflected in their books, films and songs. Though I suppose if you're young enough that Mulan 1998 is a classic film from the good old days you might simply be ignorant of a lot of the crazy shit that went on.

Look up parents re-watching films from their youth with their children, to realise, horrified, what passed as entertainment in their youth that is now shocking to them and stuff they don't want their kids to emulate or look up to.

EamonnMR
> hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars

Star Wars (New Hope) is nothing of the sort. The universe just got progressively smaller as they retconned every character into being related to every other character.

ZeroGravitas
I meant that as general dig at "princesses" in film and history, not the specific weird Star Wars geneaology.

Star Wars is basically old War Movies, Flash Gordon serials and Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies spliced together, as such it draws on the long history of storytelling that, in turn reflecting their own 'good old days', often revolves around the beautiful and genetically superior children of heriditary dictators who murdererd their way into power and how they deserve to be the rightful ruler and basically owner of the populace.

This is not a good lesson and is exactly the kind of thing Terry Pratchett satirizes with Lance Constable Carrot Ironfoundersson in Discworld, or George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.

JanneVee
Nostalgia that is the most natural thing in the world is defined as 'fascist' now?
ZeroGravitas
"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." -- Yoda

These are all 'natural things', doesn't mean we should rush to embrace them and the people who use them to manipulate us.

JanneVee
So my affinity and longing for simpler times with 8-bit computers can be used to manipulate me for someones ideological purposes? There is a huge gap between someone saying 'it used to be better' and the primrose path to embracing a fascists autocrat!
zthrowaway
Do you know what fascist means? Or are we just going to use that word for everything that we find unappealing now?

Would love for you to define it, and explain how it applies to American nostalgia for older classic movies that are a foundation of our pop culture.

watwut
It is nostalgia for movie era that never really was. By cherry picking old movies and seeing in them what you want to see. Which is something different then trying to analyse actual past production as it actually was.

It is seeing decadence in contrast to past heavenly era, because you want it to be like that.

zthrowaway
Okay, you can have a problem with people glorifying the old days. But that still has nothing to do with fascism. My above question has yet to be answered.
watwut
Your question is meaningless, because the comment you answered to did not claimed nostalgia is fascist.

He said, youtube algorithm is giving him vaguely fascist content.Bringing up "Birth of Nation" in literally second paragraph.

And I did not said anything about glorifying past, I said the narrative lies about the past.

zthrowaway
> Your question is meaningless, because the comment you answered to did not claimed nostalgia is fascist.

In OP's post:

> Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days"

So yeah, no. The OP here used the word fascist in reference to the idea of "bring back the good old days".

watwut
In referencie to that and butcher of other things. So, no.
ZeroGravitas
> The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

zthrowaway
Trying to spin people glorifying classic movies to be a form of Nazi degenerate art would've worked better (though I disagree with this even being remotely the same thing and view it as hyperbolic.) This still has nothing to do with fascism.
dudul
Yes, and not liking modern day things is defined as "racist" /s
marcosdumay
Isn't the modern dictionary definition of that word "anything you don't like"?

It's the only way I see it used.

throw872291
OP is replying to a video titled 'why modern movies suck'. So OP is not referring to nostalgia. It's more a reaction to 'old times wow, now sucks'.

If the video was titled 'Why I love these old films', then your reply makes sense.

JanneVee
I'm just replying to the notion of that the critique has a undertone of fascist feeling. The comment is somehow anchored in that any critique of modern movies is reactionary and does not have any merit of its own. What I'm trying to convey is that there is a difference between critique that is somewhat nostalgic and it would be different if the critique was ideological. I don't find much ideological bias in "the critical drinker" videos more of nostalgic bias.
ZeroGravitas
He literally starts by saying that these modern films are creating "a generation of shit people" and as proof asks you to log into TikTok and flashes up a clip of a young woman.

Why is this person 'shit'? I have no idea. Why is this whole generation 'shit'? Especially compared with a slightly older male Youtuber talking about Mulan, which many impartial observers would place in broadly the same class of pointless internet celeb.

If I wanted to briefly indicate the problems of this (or any other) generation, I could think of better things to flash up than a girl talking on TikTok, but apparently this wholesome nostalgia for the movies of his youth requires him to do this and say those things. And you didn't even notice this?

JanneVee
I never claimed that it was 'wholesome' that is something you filled in. I'm pointing out that the your analysis is flawed that you are trying to pin ideological label on a "scottish alcoholic" and conflating that somehow the youtube algorithm is fueling a 'fascist feeling'. The truth is that all of these algorithm are maximising for engagement and the signal that it is latching onto here isn't fascism it is nostalgia. Is this persona being 'wholesome' and 'kind' in his speech? And the answer is no!

Fascism uses the nostalgic feeling specifically around national mythos and the character of its citizens but it is the nostalgia that comes first and the demogogs latch onto that feeling. And I fail to see how the The Critical Drinker would constitute a fascist demagogue although he is not wholesome in anyway.

ZeroGravitas
It was just a vibe I got from like 5 minutes of video, but here's a comment from someone who has watched more of his stuff:

> Was a sub until recently, kind of got tired of his "woman or POC did bad thing in X" takes. Not a bad reviewer per se, just not for me anymore.

So, yeah.

JanneVee
Yes but my point isn't about this content in particular. My reply was a little facetious.

> Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?

The Youtube algorithm only cares about you watching as many videos as possible. You are not watching it optimize for complex ideology like fascism but to the nostalgic feelings. It drives conspiracy rabbit holes like flat-earthers because the algorithm doesn't care that the earth is round it cares that you watch as many minutes as possible so they can continue presenting ads. If you are curious about Modern Monetary Theory it doesn't care that it recommends after a bunch of next videos an anti-semitic conspiracy theory about the Rotschild banker family a straight up neo-nazi. Just so they can keep you watching and getting ads along the line. And you can't teach the algorithm to avoid complex mechanism like how people succumb to conspiracies or fascism... and in some cases both...

dionidium
It's not a coincidence that all the main characters featured in this video are women. The main thing the filmmakers are trying to show is that these are girl-bosses who can do anything men can do (and more) and it's so important to show that with utter, relentless completeness, that they've created characters that are magical, who don't need to overcome anything, characters who matter mostly as individuals, who have no duties or responsibilities to anyone else (most certainly not to any men). They're just total kick-ass take-no-prisoners empowered women.

That's why these characters are good at everything from the start. It's why they never struggle. The overriding point that's trying to be conveyed in every scene is that these women kick ass. That's why the modern Mulan can't be shown as weak and later overcoming her physical weaknesses in other ways. No, she cannot be weak -- full stop. If she encounters a much larger man, then she has to kick his ass.

Addendum that shouldn't be required, but of course it is: I want to make it totally clear here that of course women leads can be interesting and dynamic and multi-dimensional. If you think I'm saying otherwise, then please don't even bother engaging, because you will have totally missed my point, which is that this particular approach to featuring women is ham-fisted and risible and probably counterproductive, in the end.

ReactiveJelly
Have you seen the feminist reading of Mad Max: Fury Road?

You might find it interesting. YouTube is not loading for me, but it's called "The avenging feminine": https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/9jzuci/bringing...

My favorite part is something the essayist points out about the mothers [1] in Fury Road: They help in every fight. They shoot, they reload guns, they operate bolt cutters, they deny guns to enemies, they assist with _any_ light work that the buff action hero and heroine are too busy to do. And if there's nothing to do, they take cover without being asked.

The mothers don't start weak and become strong, the movie isn't about that. In fact I don't think anyone in the movie gains strength. Nux has a heel-face turn, but that's all I remember for character change.

Just because they're _side_ characters doesn't mean they _aren't_ characters. There's no scene (that I recall) where you have to ask, "What are the non-combatants doing right now? Standing and watching?"

And even though they're still physically weak at the end of the movie, their actions still matter. The movie doesn't imply there's anything wrong with weakness. Even if they are like pawns on a chessboard, every pawn still matters. I think that's very empowering.

[1] I think only one of them is pregnant, but they are all escaped slaves, so they're not in shape for direct combat.

dionidium
Thanks, I'll definitely check that out.
wolverine876
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? I don't remember it well enough:

1. There are at least two women characters, with names and their own personalities (i.e., they aren't extras)

2. The women talk to each other

3. They talk to each other about something besides men.

(If you aren't familiar, an incredible number of films fail - and yes, the 'reverse Bechdel Test' (substituting men for women) is passed by almost every film.)

darkerside
Yes

https://bechdeltest.com/view/6242/mad_max:_fury_road/

Also, the Bechdel Test is incredibly misleading and distracts from the actual problem IMO, which is simple underrepresentation of women in movies. If only 20% of movie characters are women, probably 4% of dialogue (20% of 20%) would end up being women talking to each other. Solve representation, not content.

wolverine876
> the Bechdel Test is incredibly misleading and distracts from the actual problem IMO, which is simple underrepresentation of women in movies

The first question of the Bechdel Test addresses that directly: Are there at least two female characters (not extras)?

nullc
It's informative to realize that a substantial portion of movies also fail a gender reversed version of the Bechdel test (though sure, smaller than the original test)... Not only does it reflect the representation in main roles, it also counts films which are about men and women interacting as fails.
wolverine876
> a substantial portion of movies also fail a gender reversed version of the Bechdel test

Which movies? Go down the top movies of any year and count them. It's not even close to true.

nullc
Lets see, last night while you were sending the comment I was watching "turning red" -- AFAICT it fails it: There was no scene where two men talked to each other about something other than a woman.

Most movies have most or all of their dialog about the important characters. When the important characters are disproportionately men then thats what the dialog will be about. When the subject is about the interactions of some differently gendered characters, then the dialog will often be about a different gender than the character talking.

The prior posters point was that it reflects the under-representation of women as substantial characters more than anything else-- I'd also add that it also reflect the further under-representation of women in movies that aren't about relationships. We don't need to invoke a complicated test to observe that women are underrepresented in serious roles and stereotyped into certain kinds of plots when they do have significant roles.

dudul
You can also note a parallel with female villains. Yeah they're bad, but you know, it's not their fault. They had such a tough life. And really are they that bad?

And don't hear me wrong. I do love fleshed out bad guys/gals. I do want deep bad characters, but when the backstory can always be summarized with "she went through tough time because of bad men, so now yeah she's kind of bad" it doesn't really count.

dragontamer
> You can also note a parallel with female villains. Yeah they're bad, but you know, it's not their fault. They had such a tough life. And really are they that bad?

Popular Hollywood female villains, maybe.

My favorite female villains are Granny Goodness and Amanda Waller from DC Comics.

Granny Goodness runs an orphanage for Apokolips. On the surface, she's a sweet old lady who recruits superheroines into Darkseid's machinations. But when the going gets tough, she pulls out her super-powers to punish any orphan who goes against her will.

There's no "terrible backstory" or "not her fault" going on here. Granny Goodness is 100% loyal to the "evil new gods" of Apokolips and is incredibly competent at her role in raising new villains for the evil gods.

--------

Amanda Waller is gonna plant a bomb in your head and force you to do what she wants. Why? Cause that's what she does. She's the official government's response to counteract the rise of superheroes / metahumans (Superman / Flash / etc. etc.), and feverishly works to blackmail any prisoner into building her super team.

Jiro
>Popular Hollywood female villains, maybe.

Well, this is about "modern movies".

RobertMiller
> Yeah they're bad, but you know, it's not their fault. They had such a tough life. And really are they that bad?

A little bit of that can make for a good villain I think. Villains who were truly victims earlier in life, or have a lot of seemingly rational rhetoric to back up their position. But usually there's a point where the audience is told that yes, they really are bad, despite their background or arguments.

Ma-Ma in Dredd or Solidus in MGS2 are examples that come to mind. Ma-Ma is a heavily scarred ex-prostitute and drug addict, but shamelessly has people tortured to death and thinks little of condemning thousands of innocents to death to protect herself. Solidus talks about taking the country back from the censorious AIs that control discourse and rig elections, but he's also a former warlord who trained child soldiers and has no remorse about it.

Buldak
You're right that it's not a coincidence, but that's more a reflection of the video's author than its subject matter. I agree that the depictions of female characters in question are shallow and uninteresting, but I wonder what you're watching if you think recent blockbuster movies with male leads are much better.
RobertMiller
Classic action movies of the 80s often had very flat good-at-everything male heroes. What weaknesses does John McClain ever show in Die Hard? Vulnerability to walking barefoot on broken glass I guess, not much.

There are obviously exceptions, but generally action movies don't have very interesting characters.

dionidium
He's presented as a sad-sack alcoholic at the start of the movie!
RobertMiller
I guess I missed the alcoholism, I don't recall that. I remember he starts the movie with a bad relationship with his wife, but that's so he can win her back in the end with his counter-terrorism prowess (lol), not with any real character development that I remember.
darkerside
I feel like this is a poor example. McClain is frustrated and outmatched throughout the entire movie, and slowly is able to outmaneuver his foes through wit and determination.
dragontamer
I don't think gender has anything to do with it though.

> it's so important to show that with utter, relentless completeness, that they've created characters that are magical, who don't need to overcome anything, characters who matter mostly as individuals, who have no duties or responsibilities to anyone else (most certainly not to any men). They're just total kick-ass take-no-prisoners empowered women.

But what you've just described is Christopher Nolan's Batman (who loses to Bane physically early in the movie, and beats him by... physically overpowering Bane a bit later).

The modern "superhero" genre is completely devoid of modern responsibilities. This wasn't true before... in the 70s, you had Clark who had to be a responsible person (show up to his job, write articles, etc. etc.). Despite being a magical alien from a futuristic society, Clark Kent had a number of "human" scenes, interacting with his boss, showing off responsible uses of his powers (ex: the Robbery scene, he manages to protect Lois Lane and the Robber, by pretending to be weak. Catching the bullet and pretending to go unconscious from fright).

Today, Christopher Nolan's Batman (who is considered well written), leaves his company to go off on a Ninja-adventure. Leaves all the decision-making to a rival group of executives, and then magically takes back over the company despite his multi-year absence after siphoning funds to a secretive and poorly managed research-and-development corner of the company. And somehow the people who ran the company during his absence are the antagonists who need to be disposed of by the end of the 1st movie.

----------------

Don't get me wrong, Nolan's Batman is really interesting and fun to watch. But he's fun to watch BECAUSE he's an amoral asshole with crap moral lessons.

Iron-man is another movie character who has this effect as well. Assholes who magically get their way are often interesting to watch.

I wouldn't want any children following in the "lessons" of Nolan's Batman or 2008+ era Iron Man. They're awful moral characters.

Ray (Star Wars, episodes 7-9) is positively a saint in comparison.

dionidium
I upvoted both you and Buldak because I'm certain there's something to what you're saying. Few things are monocausal or completely explained by one factor. And surely these modern filmmaking tropes feedback on themselves and reinforce prevailing styles. Mine isn't any kind of grand unifying theory. I just think it's a factor.
dragontamer
There's a little bit of gender role in there:

Male assholes (ex: Rick from Rick and Morty, Nolan's Batman, Downy's Iron Man) are fun and interesting to watch. Female assholes are much, much harder to write (Amanda Waller, Suicide Squad, seems to be the best written one in recent films?)

I guess there's explicitly "female" movies, like "Devil Wears Prada" where that kind of behavior is more acceptable (Miranda Priestly plays the role of asshole boss).

But maybe the "formula" for what audiences accept just hasn't really been figured out yet for female characters. You certainly can't just take male-oriented tropes and try to apply them to female-oriented characters.

wolverine876
> You certainly can't just take male-oriented tropes and try to apply them to female-oriented characters.

Why do you say that? People don't, but they can. I've seen plenty of plays written for male leads but acted by females (e.g., Hamlet).

dionidium
Yeah, I think this is a pretty interesting response. That double standard feels to me like a plausible explanation for why some female characters are written differently.
stevenicr
This comment made me replay 2021 cruella in my head a bit.. the successful female asshole is successful since she does not play fair.. the younger female gets to be an asshole cuz she is poor / parents taken away (?) She then becomes a different asshole caring for only herself and single success, which her long time friends dislike.. then she gets to be a more sinister asshole because she has proof her victims have been more sinister (?)

the female lead was the same as devil wears prada right? so the typecast / emotional prejudice was already embedded..

I can see how this stuff is hard to write, once of the suicide squads tried so hard it should of just made up new characters imho.

but then this particular formula seems so easy to write - main characters get to do really bad things to people cuz those people did really bad things.

I guess this is the main appeal of spiderman type projects - they limit the bad things done to bad people (?)

I put question marks because my study and recollection of these things is of a real interest, but not well versed research / knowledge. I'm sure there is much more.

Frankly I've been disappointed in what movies/media/tv shows / social sharing - all this stuff has been teaching for lessons for a long time, I can't think of much that is done well for non-awful lessons I guess.

spywaregorilla
I tend to think the iron man movie are all trash. However I don't think they follow this pattern as you say.

By the third movie he's literally having anxiety panic attacks. He's fearful that spidey, whom he brought to the big leagues, will get hurt and it'll be on his conscious. He's afraid and guilty of the collateral damage he's spawned into the world but intializing super hero culture.

Execution of those movies aside I thought his character development arc was pretty good.

wolverine876
Men are portrayed this way all the time. Why would portraying women this way get so much attention and concern?
smegsicle
showcasing female heroes as displaying exaggerated masculine abilities (in a sexualized female body) is belittling to actual feminine virtues
vannevar
Right, though I think I'd maybe use the term "values" rather than "virtues." The underlying message of these movies is that everyone---women included---should be judged by masculine standards (plus a traditional notion of female beauty). But a pseudo-feminism that imagines a world where women succeed only through a combination of feats of strength and hotness is not feminism in any meaningful sense and serves to maintain male primacy. Changing out women for men in the same old stories is not the answer; the answer is to change the stories to put feminine values on par with masculine values. That doesn't mean we can't have kick-ass women heroes, it just means that kick-ass heroes shouldn't be our only benchmark.
wolverine876
> change the stories to put feminine values on par with masculine values

That's important too - and male characters should have those values - but no reason we can't do both.

Stop trying to put women in whatever box you like. They can have whatever values/virtues/etc that they please. Women serve regularly in militaries around the world, for example, and have for awhile. What do say to women who are fighter pilots?

vannevar
They can have whatever values/virtues/etc that they please

Sure---but how society responds to a woman's choice is a collective act that she has little control over. Nothing in my comment suggested putting women in a box, exactly the opposite. It's a spectrum, where not all men adopt masculine values and not all women adopt feminine ones. There are women who relate more to what are thought of as masculine values, like fighter pilots, and it's great that society is increasingly accepting of them. But just saying women can join the men's club is not real social change. Real social change is respecting values that are not typically associated with men. Values revolving around love and human relationships, for instance, rather than violence and mechanics.

Ask yourself why the military came to mind as an exemplary set of values for the modern woman. I'd suggest that it is because you regard military service as a desirable epitome of masculinity, and if women can achieve that same peak, then they can be regarded as equals in society. But to your own point about choice, even if no women choose to join the military, we should have female heroes who are regarded on par with any male war hero.

wolverine876
Who cares what you think - or what I think? Who are you or anyone to define what these women do or want - and then weakly try to appeal to authority by assigning your opinions the words "actual feminine virtues"? Many men used to define those 'virtues' as not working, voting, having an opinion, and as being obedient, sexy, and sexually available to them (but not to other men!) - how convenient!

> sexualized female body

So? Does it intimidate you? Should they hide or show their bodies based on what you prefer, or on what you think is right? Who the f- are you (or I) to have an opinion on what they should do. Should I have an opinion on what you do?

Meanwhile, women fight wars, run countries and corporations. They don't post much on Hacker News - look at this discussion of men saying what women should do, just like the old days. I wonder why we don't see more women here?

splintercell
> So? Does it intimidate you? Should they hide or show their bodies based on what you prefer, or on what you think is right?

Millions of years of evolution went in to get them that body, and similar number of years of evolution for me to have that reaction seeing that body.

No, I am not going to join in the collective delusion that this stuff isn't real, or socially created or can be turned off at will.

None
None
smegsicle
re-framing traditional feminine virtues (those things that most women are good at and enjoy, and which make families stronger and society flourish) as worth less than traditional masculine virtues is offensive to a lot of people, and is itself an appeal to an extremist ideology
wolverine876
> re-framing traditional feminine virtues (those things that most women are good at and enjoy, and which make families stronger and society flourish) as worth less than traditional masculine virtues is offensive to a lot of people, and is itself an appeal to an extremist ideology

Which people? And so what if they are offended? These women should change what they do because you don't like it? Again, who are you (or I) or these putative offended people to tell these women what to do?

> traditional feminine virtues

Which don't exist, except in the minds of the people who want to control what other people do.

> worth less than traditional masculine virtues

Who compared anything between whatever you think masculine and feminine are?

> an appeal to an extremist ideology

So women working, getting educations, living independently of men, living their lives they way they please - that is extremist?

30649814
>this particular approach to featuring women is ham-fisted and risible and probably counterproductive, in the end.

Counterproductive in what way? I agree with you (and the linked video) that the approach is boring. But I also think it's effective.

zionic
Deserves top comment
clove
What's the point of the third paragraph? To protect yourself from criticism?
dionidium
From a certain kind of boring, predictable, repetitive criticism that's unresponsive to any of the actual points I made in my comment, yes. It either worked or I was too pessimistic, because the responses so far have been substantive and interesting!
clove
And I was downvoted for asking the question.
spywaregorilla
I think captain marvel is an interesting one on this note. It is a problem in recent films that writers want to overpower women to make things fair, and they do a disservice to the women by doing so.

Captain marvel seems to address this directly and in a more mature way. Her character does start weak. She is shown losing repeated to her officer in physical fights and feeling inferior. Later she becomes the most powerful person the MCU has ever seen and the officer turns out to be evil.

The climax of captain marvel's character arc in her movie is him trying to bait her into fighting him on fair, unpowered terms and she basically says fuck you and blasts him with a laser. It's not explicitly a gender thing, but making a firm statement that she isn't intrinsically better than the guy without her powers but that she won't be defined by those metrics. It felt like a much better way to handle this message.

Being explicit that other people's (traditional male) competencies don't get to define your self worth.

It's a flip on the "Let's Fight Like Gentlemen" movie trope and frankly I thought it was a solid message which helped avoid this narrative pitfall even though captain marvel herself is by far the most overpowered female example of late.

xiphias2
,, I think captain marvel is an interesting one on this note. It is a problem in recent films that writers want to overpower women to make things fair, and they do a disservice to the women by doing so’’

It’s about making money: social media gives young pretty women more power than any other large group of people ever in human history (especially if they give up their morals), and of course many of them want to believe that that power is not going away, and they don’t have to do anything to keep this power.

In the past 30 year old women were very responsible, but nowdays I know people who just optimize their poses on instagram to hide the weight that they gain by partying and getting drunk every night.

Of course it’s just some poeple who this kind of life, it just got much easier to do using internet, so the temptation is much stronger.

spywaregorilla
I fear you may not have realized you have already become a curmudgeonly old man
Jiro
Captain Marvel's reference to being too emotional is a specific feminist shibboleth (https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/You%27re_being_emotiona...), which is "not explicitly a gender thing" only because that's how shibboleths work. It's absolutely a gender thing, if not explicitly one.
spywaregorilla
It's both, of course. Being too emotional is clearly a common female stereotype. The call of the antagonist is to "fight him like a man", which is a common male stereotype.

She dispels the first, but refuses to accept his premise for the latter. I think it's pretty great. It's a generalizeable message to either gender of course.

Jiro
Captain Marvel's reference to being too emotional is a specific feminist shibboleth (https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/You%27re_being_emotiona...), not something about "people".
sandworm101
A character who is put down, becomes angry, then becomes powerful and carries that anger forward. Yawn. That is the background of about half of comic characters. Compare Captain America. He was week and abused, became powerful, but actively decides not to carry baggage. It is a fish-out-of-water character that has to constantly reconcile ideology with army-inspired pragmatism and loyalty. And he has a foil (Iron Man). That's a balanced character that I can like. Captain Marvel is a hyperbolic one-sided character. Those Superman characters are doomed to be boring. Batman-like characters with complex stories are unpredictable and therefore have the potential to be interesting. Gender has nothing to do with Captain Marvel's fundamental problems.
kyriakos
Replace captain marvel with a man or an alien or anything and you still got the same story. Captain marvel being a woman adds no value or difference in this story.
spywaregorilla
It certainly adds value to young girls who are otherwise told that they cannot be action heroes- a conversation which is explicitly held in the film with respect to the female fighter pilots
spywaregorilla
> A character who is put down, becomes angry, then becomes powerful and carries that anger forward.

But... that's the opposite of what happens. It is addressing this exact concept and doing something different. He's literally asking to fight like a gentleman.

The dialogue in this scene is literally "can you keep your emotions in check long enough to take me on, or will it get the better of you?" And she rejects his cliche premise entirely as a false dichotomy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KK1Kv0IzUg

male centric story telling often uses combat ability as a metaphor for personal growth. Usually with literal dialogue or reflections on moral lessons used to emphasize this relationship with the tide of battle turning when the lesson is made clear.

I thought it was great to show that, while captain marvel's growth arc is not acquisition of strength but in deriving her self worth from herself rather than from her officer.

I agree it will be hard to make more captain marvel movies because there's very little that can challenge her, unless they're willing to make a movie without a significant violent conflict. Not easy.

Captain america is a great character concept too. I liked the falcon's series dissection of it. He's explicitly not a supremacist, while acknowledging the ease with which his circumstances could allow that- and do create that within other superheroes.

darkerside
> male centric story telling often uses combat ability as a metaphor for personal growth

Why does this have to be male centric? Gaining strength as a metaphor and parallel to personal growth is a story as old as time, and there's a reason we all like it. It's like a meet cute in a date movie. You can have fun with the trope, but at the end of the day, something like it needs to happen to make a successful story in this genre.

spywaregorilla
> Why does this have to be male centric?

I didn't say it had to?

darkerside
I'll rephrase. What makes this more central to male storytelling in particular?
spywaregorilla
Mostly just precedent. Male action heroes tend to be fighters. Even clever Odysseus just straight up murders all of this foes when he returns to Ithaca.

Female action heroes are generally few, and many of them that are, are either more tricksters or agile or just kind of oversexualized replicas of the male variety. Many of them tend to be physically weaker than their opponents even at the climax of their films and overcome it through other means whereas male action heroes will more frequently prove themselves to be superior in a pure battle of fisticuffs, sometimes even sacrificing an advantage they have so that they can "fight like a man". Consider, perhaps, Ripley from Alien and Aliens. Always underpowered. Uses a loader suit for her final confrontation.

Captain Marvel is undeniably aware of the gender connotations here. It's a pretty explicitly mentioned barrier when they discuss how women couldn't be fighter pilots. She's unusual in that she's just a powerful bruiser kind of female and is way more powerful than her foes.

Would it be entertaining to watch a bunch more female (or male) led films that take this same approach? God no. Fights are fun. If you want to subvert that for an interesting message it's got to be somewhat novel each time.

Though personally I think fights are more entertaining when they're not clearly aligned with any moral message. John Wick, perhaps, as a counterexample.

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