The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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.

>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.