I feel like movies haven’t changed much at all since around mid 90s. Like as long as current day fashion doesn’t appear in the movie, then i don’t see how a person would even be able to tell if a movie came out today vs. twenty years ago.
Easy: the effects got worse /hj
Effects have gotten better, but they’ve made everything else worse. Costume? Add it in post. Proper lighting? Add it in post. The entire set? Add it in post.
Add second screen syndrome and every new movie and TV show is perfect to have on in the background while you scroll through Facebook
Some have, some haven’t. I feel like physical explosions often work better for instance.
I don’t disagree. Practical effects are are almost always preferable to CGI, especially with things like explosions and fluid movement. I’m just saying that special effects themselves have largely improved, to the detriment of the medium as a whole
I think I get your point better now, CGI has improved and is now being used for everything because it’s “good enough” but this has lead to a reduction in quality because no one bothers to do anything properly any more?
Effects CAN be better, but studios often don’t give them enough time anymore, so they get rushed and can often look worse than stuff they did 20 years but took their time on.
The corridor digital guys have a video where they compare what an animator can do for a shot given 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days.
plus most of its catering to asia/specifically china at least for action shows, thats why Rock still get roles.
The pacing got much faster over time. Comparing LotR with a new MCU film, you clearly notice the shift. (Admittedly, LotR was a little slower than the average movie at the time)
That’s not a valid comparison, lotr was waaaay slower and longer than movies of its time. If you want to compare against a modern mcu movie then you have to compare to a similar type of movie, like for example even years before lotr look at men in black from 1997
its the buildup of the story, its so much better that way. MCU is just cocaine for a quick fix, hence why its just garbage these days, other than having to push out that much garbage to fund thier streaming service.
You’re comparing episodic spectacle movies whose source is also episodic and based on visual spectacle to a set of multi book arced epic adventure movies that are all need to be viewed to complete the story.
LOTR is MEANT to be slower, that’s one of the things that makes the books so good as well!! They take their time. I’m also weird though; one of my favorite movies is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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There’s actually quite a lot that’s changed in cinema since then. Since digital cameras and effects are incredibly common these days, we light everything very flatly so that it’s easier to change in post without reshoots. It makes lighting abysmally bad. (See wicked where the actress in vibrant green makeup looks a little grey the entire movie).
Pacing is also much faster, there’s more emphasis on not confusing audiences rather than letting things have mystery. Dialogue is more quippy rather than grounded.
Oh! And since there’s no more mid-budget movies, there’s a whole lot less comedies running around. Everything is either high budget, wall-to-wall action or grounded indie films with very little in-between.
Give us back mid-budget original films or Patrick H Willems will start kidnapping Hollywood execs one by one!
Im one bus away from Hollywood. I have some 6" zip ties and a chipped kitchen knife. LETS GO
Chipped kitchen knife
Interesting you chose to include this tidbit.
Also, do you mean chipped as in damaged, or has some kind of technology in it? 😁
What do you think?
Is this somehow an allusion to Hail, Caesar! by the Coen brothers?
It is now! After I watch it. Thanks for the suggestion.
I was referring to the aforementioned YouTuber who blames the lack of mid-budget movies for cinema being so boring now. And blames several things for the death of mid-budget movies.
Lol, that is a great response. I must warn you though, Hail, Caesar! is not the Coen brothers best movie — well, that’s a high bar. But it does feature some communists politely kidnapping George Clooney and nearly even recruiting him!
Cellphones changed shape.
90s movies did not have ‘MillenialSpeak’ / ‘Marvel-isms’. They had cheesy one-liners. Which were better.
Club scenes are no longer filled with Goths, they’re filled with Jocks and Popular Girls.
Scores are generally much less unique and interesting these days.
More frantic pacing, contemplation is not allowed, outside of arthouse films.
That’s actually quite an interesting topic. Some good things in the comments, too.
i recently rewatched the first jurassic park and wow is it so incredibly different from new movies. i don’t dislike it though.
Pratt-era is just bad, especially with pratt him self. the original JP used pratical effects and animatronics, plus a little cgi.
After Sept 11 films moved into the superhero fantasy land en masse, where good guys swoop in from the skies and save the US.
Unironically.
Saving Private Ryan came out in 1998.
Matt Damon was born in 1970.
So he was 28. He is now about 27 years older, so about 55.
Dogma was a fun movie too, especially with alan rickman as metatron.
I know a highschooler that won’t watch anything from before 2000, won’t watch lotr for other reasons like broken attention span.
A marathon of the extended editions is exactly what they need. Phone locked away during viewing.
Did this with my 16yo a couple months back. She was sick last week and marathoned them again on her own.
I was so proud
You should be!
It’s honestly one of my favourite marathons to do on a cold winter weekend, excited for my annual viewing :)
Yeah, back in uni I used to do one with my friends at least once a year. We’d get about 10 people crammed into a room with a monitor, bring an unhealthy amount of snacks, plan to start at 9am, have tech issues till 11 or 12, and then watch until midnight or 1am with a break for pizza in the evening. It was great.
That does sound great, may be time for a sleepover viewing with the friends methinks, with some pipe weed
The fact that we’ve gotten to the point where looking at little screen is bad so we need to lock it up to stare at big screen, is depressing.
And I love movies, but the thought of that as a society is depressing.
But, it’s all good FreeVee isn’t it?
I own exactly one Blu-ray set, and got my Xbox series X because it plays blu-rays.
For the extended edition directors cut of lotr. 12 hours of goodness.
Tied down, eyes fixed open like in Clockwork Orange? I named that setup the appreciation chair.
Yes! Lock the phone! Such a pet peeve
Part of why the only theatre I ever go to is Alamo.
It’s not cheap, but you don’t deal with people talking or phones out.
They’ll throw a fit and then sulk if you do that lol
That’s like saying “I refuse to drink wines older than 2000.” Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. But, some of the old ones are very, very good.
I watched Altered States for the first time a few years ago and that one got me more than most modern sci fi. It’s a masterpiece imo.
iirc that movie is like a crazy abstract art film, it’s surprising that Hollywood was willing to make it
It totally is but it’s so engaging! I had trouble paying attention to things like Mad God, but Altered States drew me right in.
I find myself dreading watching anything made after 2010.
I’m not saying everything is bad, or that everything that was earlier was good. But dang…it seems like a good 90% chance the modern movie or TV show is just a bunch of flashy and disruptive CG, incredibly fast editing to try to compete with cell phones for attention, tons of with clips and one-liners. Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
And I don’t think it’s just “things were better back when I was a teenager” bias. I can still find older movies with those some annoying traits earlier, 2010 is just the arbitrary cutoff I’m using here. And I can look back at movies from before I was born, like Hitchcock movies, and see how much better they are at handling a lot of those things.
Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
The thing you’re noticing is that they’re mastering movies for home theater setups and then everyone else gets a bad re-encode.
When you’re watching a non-HDR 1080p version with Stereo sound using streaming services’ low quality streaming codecs you’re missing a lot more than if you had a HDR1400 4k OLED and a 7.1 Atmos setup with a Blu-ray encode of the movie.
The problem is that now there is just such a large gap between ‘smartphone on a slow connection’ and ‘$80,000 home theater’ that it’s hard to make content that pushes the latter while still being viewable on the former.
Well I’m watching my own Blu-ray and dvd rips on my own Jellyfin server.
And it’s like that in theaters too- parts of things are way too dark, but also with HDR parts are way too blindingly bright. Which causes my pupils to constrict and males it even harder to see the dark parts. When I turn HDR off at home it’s better, but the dark parts are still too dark.
I think it’s an overall obsession with hyper-realism and spectacle. Make the bright lights seem as bright as possible. Make the loud parts seem as loud as possible. There are trillions of dollars fighting for your attention and movies want to do what they can to get a piece of that. So dynamic range, in all ways, is being pushed past the point of comfort, and even further past the point of realism.
same, 2010, is when movies and shows became just SLOP. this doesnt include shows that started in the 2000s but survived into 2010s. cant tolerate the new treks, they are just too bad, aside from prodigy and LOWER decks. also the titles for movies are just lazy asf now. and theres the significant increase in copaganda, military propaganda movies and shows.
Some notable things about much older movies (like Hitchcock): the limitations forced them to work harder at many things.
Black & white has contrast concerns, no color so you need to imply it in other ways.
Film costs influenced the length of a movie, so lots of those old movies are shorter, or often limited to 90 minutes. If you wanted to go longer you need to justify the length in film reel units.
Then you have pre-code movies where what you could show or say was less limited, then post-Code where the dialog suddenly becomes filled with innuendo, and typically fast-paced, so you have to pay attention and get the references.
I suspect many movies today are produced like pop music - the simpler it is, the broader it can reach.
I know a woman in her thirties with that same rule. She won’t watch the first Matrix movie.
thats oddly specific, only the 1st one, and not he other 2, the newest one doesnt count.
There have always been idiots.
tik tok attention span, aka brainrot material. i wont watch any from post 2010 , mostly because they are all slop at that point.
Must suck not allowing yourself to enjoy anything from the past, and only allowing yourself to watch the slop they make today. There’s so many great old shows and movies to pick from.
I was with you until you generalized contemporary movies. Great things were made back then and great things are made today. Same for shitty slop.
You can literally listen to writers, directors, producers, and actors all talk about how cinema now is truly lower quality (including their own work) because it’s specifically created to be a background not a center of attention. They specifically make shit for you to have on in the background while you scroll on your phone, this has drastically altered the quality of what is being filmed.
Some may. Others make art. Generalizing artists as a monolith is irresponsible.
Sure, there’s definitely good stuff to be found today as well. I’m just disappointed with the current trend of making remake after remake and reboot after reboot. Original content doesn’t get the attention it deserves in comparison.
Right? Imagine not liking fucking Glenn Miller or like Sinatra or basically any jazz. Or ffs, Star Wars.
It was the best of times,
It was the worst of times.
i had a whiskey drink, I had a vodka drink.
All the movies are older than me :3
i thought they released new movies all the time
Me too, but apparently they stopped after 2003 :3
crazy
I’m 36 and those movies were even boring at the time. Decent stories, but I would never go out of my way to watch them. If you must, watch them once and then move on with your life. I literally can’t watch them when people I know want to watch them. It’s like torture. Or just read the books.
i’m 38. lotr was aight. not watching them again.
I’ve tried to read the books many times over the decades… Tolkien is verbose for the sake of being verbose.
FFS, he spent half the first chapter of The Hobbit describing the color of the hobbit’s front door - and I’d read over 200 books before attempting The Hobbit.
(OK, it wasn’t half the chapter, but he spent inordinately long on it).
I refuse to watch the movies.
At least LOTR has not been rebooted every 5-10 years like some Marvel/DC movies.
Even if there’s probably someone itching to make a gritty reboot of LOTR.
I mean, look at the source material. One’s an epic saga the other’s a monthly brochure at the magazine corner shop.
I guess, it fits.Lol im definitely calling them monthly brochures from now on
also MCU , adding the multiversal arc to the whole franchise,dont need that.
my lord that’s depressing lol.
When people think something from 2014 is “old” i laugh in their face as I crank up my 1899 Edison victrola.
Even as a kid I never viewed something old unless it was 60+ years in the past.
It’s still hilarious to me that CGI peaked with pirates of the Caribbean.
Where’d sound mixing peak?
Has there ever been a peak?
There’s been many technical improvements, but absolutely none of them have fixed the problem you describe.
Movie audio was crap in 19th century, and it was crap on the 20th century and it’s still crap in the 21st century.
Has there ever been a peak?
No, they normalized it’s so that it was all the same level.
Yes but there’s technical crap and ‘the audio caps out quieter than the background noise in every scene’.
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That’s such a stupid take. The 90s and early 2000s were literally the golden age of feature movies. IMDB has 58 movies rated 8.5 or higher, 24 of those were released in the 15 years between 1990 and 2004. That’s about 41.4% and includes classics like Shawshank, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and of course the LotR trilogy.
Damn…
Part of what makes the internet wonderful is being able to access movies from all eras. Why limit yourself to only new stuff?
As an aside, the OG Little Shop of Horrors still holds up IMO.
Right? I am constantly watching shit from before my parents were even born. Shits well done yo
James Cagney still slaps
The remake part genuinely fucking offends me.
Well, we had the Prequel Trilogy so I guess Peter Jackson probably needs to do an entirely unneeded Fourth Age Trilogy or something?
Prequel even harder and pry the Silmarillion rights from the cold, dead bodies of the Tolkien Estate, then run it into the ground with new films, or worse, a TV show.
Better yet, don’t pry the right, so you have to come up with entirely new stories and new characters outside of what you already own the rights to! It’ll be great!
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Everyone should watch the AFI 100.
Unless a movie is horribly dated with jargon and references, or wildly out of place social issues*, any good movie should still be good.
*even something that has something like racism or misogyny in it might still be worth watching if those issues can be framed as something that should be seen as how we used to do things and why we don’t do them like that anymore.
I wonder if there’s truth to the whole iPad generation thing.
