buckeye wrote on 2022-11-23, 21:49:

Some examples: […]
Show full quote

Some examples:

Men routinely depicted as neutered weaklings, especially white men.
White characters made black.
Male characters made female.

stopped reading right there. I know what exactly dead horse this is going that isn't already covered by youtube thumbnails from professional reactionary word salads. Dead on arrival flamebait.

leileilol wrote on 2022-11-23, 22:11:

buckeye wrote on 2022-11-23, 21:49:

Some examples: […]
Show full quote

Some examples:

Men routinely depicted as neutered weaklings, especially white men.
White characters made black.
Male characters made female.

stopped reading right there. I know what exactly dead horse this is going that isn't already covered by youtube thumbnails from professional reactionary word salads. Dead on arrival flamebait.

I could care less about the ops points
but like modern music many new and remakes are rather tired tropes and aren’t well thought out in terms of plot or motivations .

I don’t care who is the actor, their race, gender, etc. but many films don’t give the actor much to work with from a creative stance. Most shows/films miss the basics of developing a character and skip to action or shock .

I would argue you see less variety and risk in the top tier stuff, more superheroes and less “storytelling”.

Streaming seems to have dropped the amount of time given to a movie or series which regardless of the budget hits the quality of the acting and score.

Discovery is a good example of not respecting the audiences intelligence or the characters with “moment of thought” style episodes that really don’t work as a series but would work stand alone as a throw a bunch of stuff and see what sticks style. some of the characters included in Discovery, especially those added later on don’t seem to have much to do and feel tacked in as an afterthought.
I still watch discovery when I am very tired but there are definitely moments where my brain needs to be off.

There are exceptions but not as many as you would like.

buckeye wrote on 2022-11-23, 21:49:

Let say this at the forefront, I'm not racist .

Then don’t worry about it,
unnecessary characters being tacked into a series certainly isn’t new, Simpsons made fun of the trope back in the dark times.
My trouble with many shows is that they don’t seem to know what to do with a character and have them show up as a take or a brief moment in every episode but the director isn’t intelligent enough to use more than 5% of the cast members with proper character development and growth or even things to do in their universe.
If you create a character you should show your creation and actor some respect so they are given space to act, the skip to action styles miss the human aspects.

>Do movies suck these days?
Turn off the tele and read some 70's 80's science fiction or something. Much better for you.
*Please mark as accepted solution.*

I'm pretty sure movies have always sucked. We forget the bad ones and remember the good ones, giving the impression that things were better in the past. They weren't.

Errius wrote on 2022-11-23, 23:46:

I'm pretty sure movies have always sucked. We forget the bad ones and remember the good ones, giving the impression that things were better in the past. They weren't.

Agreed, op should start watching RedLetterMedia, we used to enjoy a lot of slop it appears

There's plenty of reasons to not like new movies without going into some "i'm not racist but" white cishet alpha male fantasy bigoted vile fascist horseshit, like:

- marvel crunching and underpaying VFX studios for the annual power spandex fests
- half-hearted LGBTQ+ representation conveniently edited out for overseas markets
- "reboot" sequels for the sake of retaining an IP

You should already know you can't have a discussion about white men, female empowerment, gender and race switching and politics without being shouted down as part of the problem. No one is a able to have a grown up conversation. Best bet would be to remove that from your post since I can only assume you added those to get more responses. The neglect of men is an issue but short sighted humans are incapable of tackling things until the problem is unmanageable. We are in the early stages of this becoming apparent to most people, I hope. There are many examples of controlling the narative but one of the easiest is the persecution of witches which is commonly portrayed as female persecution but men were persecuted as well in a sizeable amount but that doesn't fit the narrative.

There is a ton of media out there so unless you've watched them all then you can't say they all "suck". Define "suck". Do some or even most suck? Undoubtedly. Do superhero movies "suck"? Not unless they do, but they aren't very good and aren't designed to be. They are popcorn movies.

All movies are not strictly for entertainment, comics are not movies and movies are not comics. Sometimes it's a good thing that a director is not familiar with the source.

Streaming is just a technology it doesn't nevessarily factor on runtime, other factors mainly decide this. You have those that want serialized shows vs those that don't. Shows designed to be long vs those designed to be short. Shows designed to have 24 episodes that may have a lot of bloat vs those that may be only 4, 6 or 8 episodes.

The first ever movie "sucked" so you could say movies have always "sucked".

no! not my male representation!

buckeye wrote on 2022-11-23, 21:49:

Men routinely depicted as neutered weaklings, especially white men. White characters made black. Male characters made female. An […]
Show full quote

Men routinely depicted as neutered weaklings, especially white men.
White characters made black.
Male characters made female.
Any other examples you care to offer?

Oh, Netflix!

Maverick was excellent. I've watched my fair share of netflix and amazon, they still have good shows. But. ya, special effects, and virtue signaling doesn't make up for bad writing and acting. It's great to have inclusion otherwise.

Not sure if you're asking about movies in general or superhero movies specifically, but that's funny because it seems these two are pretty much equivalent nowadays. Personally I think all this Marvel stuff is utter dogshit, even the most successful ones (yeah, I've only seen a bunch but enough to make a judgment). Now, perhaps seeing people run around in spandex or fake armor while screaming "snappy" comedic one-liners as things explode just doesn't seem as interesting at 40 years old as it may have when I was like 10, but none of this manages to get a single emotion out of me. There's like a total lack of tension to these things that prevents me to get focused more than 5 or 10 minutes on what's going on.

Don't get me wrong, I think comics as an art form does have its value, it's just that the art style and storytelling aspects of it do not directly translate properly to the movie format, being washed out in the process. And I AM familiar with lots of Marvel/DC stuff, was a pretty big fan as a kid, but this stuff is so distilled... Personally I think the Tim Burton Batman movies have way more cinematic value than anything Marvel or DC produced in the last 20 years.

Regarding the diversity stuff, I don't think there's any specific agenda behind it. The studio executives don't care about representation, empowerment or minorities, it's just them cynically ticking the marks on the "diversity" checklist, just like everything else in these movies... it seems they are made by following checklists so they can churn out "product" more effectively.

You have to keep in mind that back then, even though most movies were also made with the goal of being profitable, the studio heads were either filmmakers or at least people who knew enough about the craft, sure stuff could also fail and be of terrible quality, but the artistic vision was usually a significant aspect. Now, it's just a bunch of conglomerates with execs whose only objective is to keep the investors happy, so they're naturally highly averse to any kind of risk. The situation is very similar in AAA gaming, that's why most things don't have the same staying power or groundbreaking qualities as before, it's not due to lack of talent or originality (of which there is a lot everywhere), it's by design.

The problem with movies now is that the writing is completely brain dead. Not every movie said something, but the ones we remember did. And it wasn't some weird contemporary pabulum that was going around in it's time either. It said something about the human condition.

Writers these days seem scarcely aware of the human condition. They no longer care at all about trying to communicate universal human truths. It's all weird, fractured, contemporary identity bullshit the whole way down. Characters are no longer fully realized people with their own internal motivations and drive. They are weird, hollow dead things, echoing the facile nonsense coming out of a writers room that, far from trying to say anything, is trying to unsay as hard as they can all the important lessons we've learned over thousands of years of human flourishing.

What I miss in nowadays movies/films is a thrilling atmosphere. With slow movement, slow change of scene, a fascinating story line.
In style of films like The Fog, Pet Sematary or Langoliers.

Instead, it's all about action, explosions, torture, gore.
Or melodramas, "epic" storytelling, political correctness that feels "forced".

As for the later, please don't get me wrong. I support the idea of equality and supporting minorities.
But films fail to make it look/feel natural, honest.

That's in contrast to old shows like Star Trek TOS, in which diversity simply felt reasonable, progressive and honest.
Same goes for TNG, in which a person of colour got a major role and played it excellent (even though the actor was already a VIP sort of).

That's something that worries me a bit.

Children notice this, by the way. If you tell them a bed time story about a crazy patchwork family, in which all gender roles are upside down and the situation is presented as "normal", they notice that something is fishy.
Unless it has a humorous take, maybe. Then they may accept it as what it is, a light-hearted and funny story in the phantasy domain.

Children are very sensitive to this. They can feel when something is natural/honest and when it's not.
Again, don't get me wrong. A story with, say, two mammas or two papas is totally fine.
There's nothing wrong with it, as long as they have a loving relationship.
But if the whole fictional family is assembled of pro-diversity stereotypes, they will notice. They will feel being fooled. Maybe even develop some sort of aversion against that topic. Which would be sad.

Edit: Last but not least, there's one bit tzat seems to be overseen..
Here in Europe, we don't have the exact same situation of racial/sexual problems as in, say, the US.

However, since the web has no borders, we get the same response in social media etc.
People and groups suddenly start to debate things that weren't even a problem just recently. As if we had the same grievances.

Sure, Europe has problems. Many, actually. And the rights for minorities need further expansion, maybe.
But the kind or level of discrimination isn't the same as in the US.

The Netherlands, for example, are very progressive in that field. Or so I heard. Since 2018, you don't need to have a gender mentioned on the ID card, afaik.
So it wouldn't make sense to handle that topic as aggressively as in the US, for example.

Or in other words, we *usually*can talk about these things in a civil way, find a solution.
We don't necessarily need a mud fight on TV, crying people in a TV show or screaming protesters in front of a government building.

Edit: I hope you don't get me wrong. It's not about US vs Europe. I just took Europe because I'm from it.

It's about the matter that social problems are different among the regions/countries.
While some of them may apparent everywhere (say, rights of women/children), their intensity isn't. Some places on earth are more friendly in one matter, but less in another.

The lack differentiation in this field could worse a situation in a country in which the situation was better just before.

The aggressive methods (maybe) needed in, say, the US, could be totally contra productive to a country which already was very tolerant or progressive before.

The aggressive acting of younger, naive protesters, -inspired by media from overseas-, could even cause existing rights to be newly debated, then removed.

That's what worries me. Certain things shouldn't be taken over 1:1 maybe.

Edit: Just to clarify: I'm NOT judging. I'm not defining what's right or wrong. I'm not forcing my own ideology on to you.
I'm merely saying that certain social situations are different among the globe, that certain things aren't 1:1 applicable here and there.

Gah another one of these threads? There's endless content out there from around the world, so OP if you can't find something you like then look harder. I.e. look beyond the blockbuster Marvell trash.

badmojo wrote on 2022-11-24, 05:06:

Gah another one of these threads? There's endless content out there from around the world, so OP if you can't find something you like then look harder. I.e. look beyond the blockbuster Marvell trash.

Excuse me, but if we can't speak about these things anymore, at all, then what is about democracy? 🙁
We're a western forum. A forum is about exchanging thoughts and ideas.
The concept is the very heart of the idea of the so called "free world".
If we can't stand the point of view of others anymore, then we have lost something.

I'm no political activists, whatsoever.
But there's a moment in which each of us must decide if we stand up for something.
Democracy itself was never as much in danger (or: being questioned), as it's now.

If we can't discuss certain things in a civil way anymore then the whole idea of a forum becomes ad absurdum.

What's next? People get upset because 1980s CGA graphics are being glorified, but 90s VGA graphics are being neglected these days?
Where to draw the line?

Films always had been a mirror of society, an image of fears, dreams and hopes.

So if some talks about horror films, we must close the thread because another person may feel offended by all the violence?

Please don't get me wrong. I don't like propaganda or whatsoever.
Personally, I think that the truth often lies somewhere "in between".

But if we absolutely can't debate social things anymore, then things would become very depressing.
Every second thread would become questionable then.

Edit: Or let me put me this way:

If someone says, for example, "I think that real fur coats are great" then it's a controversial statement, but also merely a single person's opinion.
He/she/they didn't say "Real fur coats are great!", after all.
That's a fine little detail that's important!

Even here in Germany, where we can't say everything without consequences (say, throwing swear words to a police officer),
we can say anything as long as it's an opinion.

Example: You can't say to a police men "You're an idiot", but you can say "In my opinion, you're an idiot". Yes, that's fine. Because it's merely your personal opinion. It's not a fact, after all.

The right of free opinion is one of the highest goods in a democratic country, as far as I know.

Edit: Again, please don't get me wrong. I don't think that Vogons should become a political platform!
I really love this place and it indeed is one of the last places not occupied by moral apostles, hate and aggressivity.
But ironically, that's exactly because here always has been a degree of tolerance!

If someone was making a mistake or went a bit off-topic it was being tolerated (to some degree) and at some point, the moderators gave a friendly reminder to please go back on topic again.
(Even though often, the users would find their way back on topic on their own.)
Or they removed links to questionable places.
But otherwise, they were always being fair, polite and the decisions were based individually on the situation, afaik.
Threads weren't locked for no apparent reasons. This isn't something that can be taken for granted accross the internet.

Also, users/members were and are generally very helpful in this place; they come back after a while once they found out a solution for another person etc.

I can only hope that all of you understand what I mean to say. There are no bad intentions.
In addition, my English isn't the very best anymore and there are deep cultural differences, it seems.
It's a learning process to me, as I've found out.

Edit: I think that's pretty much what I meant to say.
There's no need to worry that I go on any further with this discussion.
I've written so much/so detailed because I wanted not to be misunderstood, because I did not want to make people feel offended here.
If only my writing skills were a bit better, then the posting(s) could have been much shorter. *sigh*😔

buckeye wrote on 2022-11-23, 21:49:

Are not movies supposed to be about entertainment and distraction from this screwed up world we now inhabit? Seems more and more […]
Show full quote

Are not movies supposed to be about entertainment and distraction from this screwed up world we now inhabit? Seems
more and more it's more about powerful messages, equal rep, female empowerment and other political overtones. When
you enlist someone to direct say the movie Eternals or the She Hulk series and they confess never having read the comics
or source material is that not a obvious attempt to push forward a specific agenda? For what purpose?

Some examples:

Men routinely depicted as neutered weaklings, especially white men.
White characters made black.
Male characters made female.
Any other examples you care to offer?

I'm new to this forum but I will happily wade into this morass. I'm with you how the above feels "forced". Like with the recent Dune movie and Kynes suddenly having changed gender and race!
But to me, it doesn't make a movie "suck" automatically. Dune was a good watch and a much better rendition than the 1986 version, to my mind.
Call me a "vile fascist" or whatever (I'm actually pretty left wing). I don't like it when an agenda, any agenda, is being pushed in a surreptitious way. Brings out a noncormist streak.

Anyway. On the subject of today's movies sucking, I'm not sure. I never liked superhero movies, but I agree that mainstream movies seem to rely more on CGI and shock value and less on maintaining the viewer's attention span, leaving things up to the imagination, etcetera. I suppose they're trying to cater to an audience that is used to instagram, instant gratification, etcetera. There's still plenty of good stuff out there though.

There was another topic like this a couple of months ago. It was quickly deleted.

As for modern movies, My biggest problem with them is the overuse of CGI. I often find it difficult to get immersed in such movies. Sure, movies with practical effects are often not as dynamic, since they have to work with real physical objects, but that just adds a sense of authenticity CGI lacks to this day.

As for the political stuff in movies, that's sadly pretty much impossible to discuss in a civilized manner.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-11-24, 11:23:

As for modern movies, My biggest problem with them is the overuse of CGI. I often find it difficult to get immersed in such movies.

Same with me. I like to watch Horror movies with a good friend and currently we're going through the classics.
"The Thing" from 1982 is just so damn creepy due to its practical effects used. That dog transformation still gives me shivers because it looks so real.

You feel like you're really there in this dark environment. But when I watch a modern movie that's supposed to creep me out and the animations are just a little off, it's not creeping me out at all.

And let's not talk about Marvel...quantity over quality seems to be their credo. They might as well call their next movie [Insert random dudes fighting other dudes while things explode]. Booooring!

western society has certainly gone well past it peak..
movies are just one aspect of a decline in quality...
it is utterly staggering the decline that has occurred in only slightly over 20 years... we did seem to be riding a wave that reached its peak around 2000..
take 1999, american beauty, american psycho, office space, fight club, matrix.. all these films grappling with deep issues of finding meaning and reality..
cant think of too many recent films that i have enjoyed, maybe joker (but hey that was pretty much just taxi driver redone)
marvel, dc 45 min action fight sequences that leave you without a memory the moment the credits roll, GTFO with that crap..

sorry we have EXACTLY what is to be expected in a morally devoid and declining society..