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The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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231 points frogulis | 5 comments | 15 Jul 25 03:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.02s | source
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buildingsramen ◴[15 Jul 25 14:29 UTC] No.44571527[source]▶
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.

The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.

> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.

Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.

> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.

Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.

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Barrin92 ◴[15 Jul 25 15:05 UTC] No.44571900[source]▶
>but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field

sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things.

I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and today, and in the past there was a lot of overlap. Today completely divorced. And it's honestly because the audience, not the critics, just can't take anything unconventional. Creators that had mainstream appeal, Kubrick, Tarkovsky were out there by today's standard. You could not put the opening scene of 2001 in front of a modern audience without half of the people playing subway surfers on their phones. Or take Lynch, he wasn't just niche, people made an effort to understand that stuff.

I noticed this in other media too. I saw reviews for Kojima's Death Stranding 2 and every five seconds someone went it's so weird as if that's almost an offense, from the guy who made the Metal Gear universe. You make something like Evangelion today, the biggest mainstream anime franchise at the time, you'd probably have people on social media cancelling it for some of the more Freudian stuff in it, and complain because there's not enough plot in it.

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1. dmonitor ◴[15 Jul 25 16:39 UTC] No.44573064[source]▶
Many of Kubrick's movies were panned at release and only received merits upon reexamination. Even 2001 was initially met with a mixed reception.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...

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2. rbanffy ◴[15 Jul 25 22:27 UTC] No.44576521[source]▶
2001 is one of those movies that get better with every rewatch. The only part that doesn’t get much better is the stat gate sequence, which starts to get a bit long after a couple watches. Otherwise, every minute detail is masterfully crafted into the finished movie.
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3. twoodfin ◴[16 Jul 25 02:15 UTC] No.44578039[source]▶
Couple of points in defense of the stargate sequence:

a) It’s meant to be seen and heard on what even today would be a pretty insane cinematic setup. Even moreso than the rest of the film, it loses a lot in the translation to the home theater, or even a typical multiplex. Maybe this is heretical, but I’d love to see a carefully upscaled, remixed 2001 in IMAX.

b) The stargate is perhaps the singular element of the film that was the easiest to imitate, vs. say the incredibly thoughtful and detailed production design. So it was replicated to the point of psychedelic cliché.

Genuinely curious if contemporary audiences found it overlong or just perplexing.

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4. rbanffy ◴[16 Jul 25 09:56 UTC] No.44580475{3}[source]▶
There are parts of it in false color that are perhaps a bit more obvious and less "magical" now.

I would love to see what Stanley Kubrick (and Douglas Trumbull) could achieve with current technology for the same sequence. I'm not sure audiences would survive the warping of their senses though. Some would come out irreversibly transformed.

5. DoktorDelta ◴[17 Jul 25 06:30 UTC] No.44590339[source]▶
I recently did a rewatch where I replaced the audio in 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' with Pink Floyd's 'Echoes'. It really changed the experience for me. Going into 20+ minutes of psychedelic rock after over 100 minutes of classical music really made it feel like a transformative experience.