Why 99% of (Mainstream) Movies are Garbage

hanselthecaretaker

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TL;DW: Movies have forgotten their one job, which is to entertain. Although it also touches on that we’ve reached a saturation point in practically every genre where we’ve seen it all before, and we’re still waiting for the next big thing that will actually surprise us.
 
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gorfias

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A buddy just IM'd me on facebook with this very same clip. A movie with the resources of, say, Start Wars, should never fail. That they messed up the sequel trilogy, badly, should cause someone to be facing charges for negligence.
 

Thaluikhain

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TL;DW: Movies have forgotten their one job, which is to entertain.
That's a controversial point there. In the movie industry, they are products intended to make money, after all. I'd also mention advertising, education and propaganda for other jobs.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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That's a controversial point there. In the movie industry, they are products intended to make money, after all. I'd also mention advertising, education and propaganda for other jobs.
That's brought up as being a part of the reason they fail, ironically enough.
 
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Baffle

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I disagree. I didn't find I, Daniel Blake entertaining as such, but it's still a great film because it pushes people to see things from another perspective that they're not going to experience outside of film, and it did so in a way that you could believe.
 

happyninja42

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TL;DW: Movies have forgotten their one job, which is to entertain. Although it also touches on that we’ve reached a saturation point in practically every genre where we’ve seen it all before, and we’re still waiting for the next big thing that will actually surprise us.
Eh, I disagree that we're all just waiting for a new surprise. Considering how we keep telling the same stories over and over, for thousands of years, we clearly are perfectly fine with the old faithful stories. We just want them told in a way that is entertaining. I think THAT is the bigger problem, that people don't take the time to craft the classic stories well enough to be engaging. So people find themselves bored, because they are familiar with the elements, even if they don't actually analyze and critique film structure, they're still unconsciously familiar with the tropes. And they get frustrated with the delivery.
 

SilentPony

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Isn't "entertainment" subjective? Some people actually like teen highschool dramas, or those awful Saw and Hostile torture porn movies. I enjoyed Endgame and Infinity War, and know some people who didn't.
Saying movies are meant to entertain is as obvious as it is meaningless. Its like saying porn is meant to get you horny. Yes, but everyone has different taste. No one porn gets EVERYONE horny, and no one movie just entertains the world.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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People aren't looking hard enough. Entertainment exists beyond the mainstream in every medium, this is same old limited perception you see in music, literature, games, pigeon spotting, fashion, chemical cartography, extreme dogging, anything creative that pays management well in a system that rewards those most who can put the least effort in for the most amount of exploitation and bucks for return. People get stuck complaining on what's playing on the popular radio stations unaware or unwilling to go looking elsewhere.
 
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BrawlMan

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Eh, I disagree that we're all just waiting for a new surprise. Considering how we keep telling the same stories over and over, for thousands of years, we clearly are perfectly fine with the old faithful stories. We just want them told in a way that is entertaining. I think THAT is the bigger problem, that people don't take the time to craft the classic stories well enough to be engaging. So people find themselves bored, because they are familiar with the elements, even if they don't actually analyze and critique film structure, they're still unconsciously familiar with the tropes. And they get frustrated with the delivery.
This. Besides, this guy ranting in the vid, misses the point of Sturgeon's Law so hard. It's not 99%, it's 90% of everything is crap you dingus!

those awful Saw and Hostile torture porn movies
Funny enough, you're not gonna find many defenders of Hostel III. Even from hardcore Hostel fans. Spiral is getting bad to mediocre reception from critics, movie goers, and fans. I stopped caring for Saw after V, and Hostel I immediately quit after seeing the II.
 
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happyninja42

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Isn't "entertainment" subjective? Some people actually like teen highschool dramas, or those awful Saw and Hostile torture porn movies. I enjoyed Endgame and Infinity War, and know some people who didn't.
Saying movies are meant to entertain is as obvious as it is meaningless. Its like saying porn is meant to get you horny. Yes, but everyone has different taste. No one porn gets EVERYONE horny, and no one movie just entertains the world.
Yeah, saying 99% is a huge bit of hyperbole. It's assuming that everyone shares that article's taste on what is entertaining. I think one issue a lot of these "film is dead" like Martin Scorscese is they are 1) Way to egotistical, and far up their own ass to smell anything but their own farts, 2) Assuming every film is trying to be the next Citizen Kane. Which I personally find really funny, since I don't know a single person who has ever actually SEEN Citizen Kane, but everyone knows "oh yes, it's totally the greatest film of all time." Yeah, I question that. It's just cultural conditioning at this point.

As long as I'm enjoying what I'm seeing, I don't really care. Sure I have my own standards on what is good/bad, but if the film indicates it's tone up front, then I'm usually fine with it. Like Aquaman for example. It went for campy, silly, dudebro action, and had a firm conviction to not take itself seriously. This was made apparent right away, so I was ok with what came after. It was going for Flash Gordon, and I was down for that. And I don't know if I would call it a "good" film, as far as things like objective components of film structure and stuff. It has some great moments here and there, but it's not a classic film. I still enjoyed the hell out of it, and was openly laughing and grinning at multiple points. Plus, I really enjoyed the way they ended the conflict. It was not how you would typically see that kind of story resolve itself. So kudos on tossing a nice variant on the classic story.

But then other films, try and make a statement, but then fail to actually convey that statement, or end up contradicting it with what they have the characters do. And that's bad.

Someone can still ENJOY it though. And I'm loathe to call anything "garbage", as that's just some arrogant BS right there. I try and restrain my criticisms to either subjective points "I did/didn't like this because of X" or objective things like "The narrative was choppy because in Act 1 they say X, but in Act 2, they say Y, which is in direct contradiction"
 

BrawlMan

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Yeah, saying 99% is a huge bit of hyperbole. It's assuming that everyone shares that article's taste on what is entertaining. I think one issue a lot of these "film is dead" like Martin Scorscese is they are 1) Way to egotistical, and far up their own ass to smell anything but their own farts, 2) Assuming every film is trying to be the next Citizen Kane.
HA!

Which I personally find really funny, since I don't know a single person who has ever actually SEEN Citizen Kane, but everyone knows "oh yes, it's totally the greatest film of all time." Yeah, I question that. It's just cultural conditioning at this point.
Citizen Kane was pretty meh for. The only reason it gets "praise" is to please old fools or people who scared that their high snob filming peers will think less of them for being different. The funny thing was, even for its time, most of the public thought CK was either mediocre or average. I don't when started as a requirement for calling CK the greatest film of all time, but if I had to guess, around the 1970s. The men saying that were either high on weed, their own farts, or both.

99% of everything is garbage, honestly.
Like that "expert" in the video, you're wrong. At max, it's 95% at worst, or if you're really feeling pessimistic and cynical. The only thing that comes close to 95% for me is AAA gaming and maybe anime. Granted, I only see what interests me any way, and most anime does nothing for me. With that said, the anime genre in the old-school days was not perfect either. Racism, cultural stereotyping, dubbing was bad or mediocre, and did start get really good until the mid 90s.


 
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happyninja42

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Citizen Kane was pretty meh for. The only reason it gets "praise" is to please old fools or people who scared that their high snob filming peers will think less of them for being different. The funny thing was, even for its time, most of the public though CK was either mediocre or average. I don't when started as a requirement for calling CK the greatest film of all time, but if I had to guess, around the 1970s. The men saying that were either high on weed, their own farts, or both.
Hey, for all I know it IS the greatest film ever made, I don't know because I've never seen it. And I don't know anyone who has, and I suspect the number of people who HAVE seen it, is dwindling every day. I just mean that in the actual, cultural lexicon of films, OUTSIDE of film students, it's basically non-existent. It has no bearing on their viewing of films, and at best, is a pop culture thing they've likely only heard of through things like Family Guy. And they probably were like "...wtf is that? I guess that's something my parents would get." And just shrug and move on. So trying to make these "masterpieces" is just so much masturbatorial self indulgence.
 

happyninja42

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Funny enough, to my parents, Citizen Kane might as well not even exist.
Yeah, that statement was probably several generations out of date. Because even for me, that movie was "one of those old timey movies that maybe my parents watched, but probably not given their tastes in film." And I'm fucking 45 so, yeah. It's basically a fossil at this point.
 

McElroy

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Hey, for all I know it IS the greatest film ever made, I don't know because I've never seen it. And I don't know anyone who has, and I suspect the number of people who HAVE seen it, is dwindling every day. I just mean that in the actual, cultural lexicon of films, OUTSIDE of film students, it's basically non-existent. It has no bearing on their viewing of films, and at best, is a pop culture thing they've likely only heard of through things like Family Guy. And they probably were like "...wtf is that? I guess that's something my parents would get." And just shrug and move on. So trying to make these "masterpieces" is just so much masturbatorial self indulgence.
I only saw it on... (let's see I can dig the date from the movie review thread) Christmas day 2020! Dissing ground-breaking films because people that like them seem smug about contemporary movies is pretty annoying, tbh, and I think it drives a fault between average movie-goer and so called elitists. Enjoying and praising Citizen Kane, Casablanca, or Breathless is still far from watching art movies that are meant to be the opposite of entertaining because of some artistic merit that only the filmmaker understands. Orson Welles got an amazing deal from the studio at the time that allowed him full creative control to make Citizen Kane. Utilizing that control as well as he did already lifts it above most releases, contemporary or modern.

Funny enough, to my parents, Citizen Kane might as well not even exist.
Filmmakers of today stand on the shoulders of giants. Even though some episodes muck about in obscure world cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey is pretty good especially at demonstrating progress in filmmaking.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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To clarify a couple things -

The “entertainment” criteria of course means different things to everyone, but this video drew the complaint that movies now are far too often trying to check too many boxes and please too many masters vs just the one box labeled “fun”.

In terms of being able to surprise vs watching the same old stories, it made the point that it’s important to defy cliches; ie being the one movie in a genre that doesn’t do what all the others did (saving the girl in a hero movie, the thing blowing up at the end in an action movie, etc.). I suppose if someone’s really crafty they could keep telling iterations ad-infinite of the same stories but they’re still ultimately not saying anything new. No matter how good a derivative idea is it won’t have the same impact as an as-good new idea.
 
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