Quote:
Originally Posted by
wd40 
But isn't that the point? Why bother?
And many, many of these people are brainless. They are the same ones that watch (and believe) Fox News, eat up the Kardashians, read People religiously and camp out to see the next Twilight. I am not speaking of the people that just watch movies and move on. (Although I still don't understand the point of that either). I am talking about a shockingly large group of indifferent people.
Perhaps I am just too exposed to the people that think things like The Fountain or Looper don't deserve discussion, yet they will wax on for hours about how awesome The Dark Knight was, or how they are getting in line for the midnight show of Breaking Dawn. Many of these people are completely shallow individuals and they dedicate zero philosophical thought to anything in their lives. They happily reside in the 'Matrix'. They love the blue pill.
Often, these people ask me what I think of a movie and I get glazed eyes in reply. By the time I finish with my critique, I hear: "you are so critical! I thought it was entertaining."
That's a fucking cop-out, bullshit answer (and a waste of my time). If you just want to pass the time put on TBS or TNT or USA all afternoon and you can get plenty of crap that doesn't engage you. Instead, you claim to be a fan of movies, you see several in the theater and as a result Transformers happens.
Anymore, most movies suck these days because "it was entertaining" has become the resigned response from the masses. It's not even a matter of bad taste. It's just that they don't care. I am not nearly as eloquent or well-spoken like a majority of Chewers, but I am passionate. And this topic is a pet peeve of mine.
This is pretty dead on.
The problem is Hollywood has conditioned audiences to invest little to no thought into what they watch. Part of what helps this is the traditional 3 act narrative structure that's been in use for many decades with very little variation. When people go to the movies, they have a pretty good idea of what they're going to see and how it's going to play out...the only thing that changes are the actors, scenery, and very minor details in the plot that are fairly inconsequential.
Who can blame an audience who is used to seeing the same 7 stories continually repackaged over and over and over and over again? They put no thought into it because it doesn't require any thought. It's one of the reasons why even I don't put any thought into most of these movies. There is nothing to think about. These days I spend very little time in threads like TDKR, or Skyfall, or Spider-Man, or Man of Steel or World War Z (unless it's to make fun of it)....or pick your mainstream studio film. TDKR did nothing to surprise me. I'm not a Bond fan because I feel like it's beyond formulaic. Ditto for Spider-Man, Man of Steel, etc...
It saddens me that threads like The Master, Looper, Cosmopolis, Upstream Color, The Bay, Django, etc, get very little replies compared to the more mainstream threads. I don't think TDKR deserves 2,700 replies. I'd expect that film to get massive responses on a yahoo message board, not a cinema lovers paradise like Chud. Not that it doesn't deserve to be talked about, but when TDKR has 2,700 responses and Cosmopolis has 79...I scratch my head and wonder what the fuck is on people's minds.
Cinema is a rich cultural art form with HUUUUGE amounts of potential, and I feel like Hollywood is tapping maybe 10% of it. Budgets are so massive they can't take any chances. The shareholders simply wouldn't allow it. And since studios control the vast majority of what gets seen by the masses, everything gets collapsed into the dull, lazy, formulaic wasteland of mainstream filmmaking. The films themselves have never looked and sounded better, but the content is probably the worst its ever been. Bad movies have always existed, but the bad movies of yesteryear were created by filmmakers simply failing at doing a good job. The studios used to compete with each other in terms of "who's got the best film". Today they compete purely from a box office point of view, "who's got the number one film?". This is an ass backwards way of making movies, and it's no wonder the audience has been bludgeoned into stupidity.
It is still a choice though. Studios only follow the money. If the masses stopped flocking to fucking Spider-Man and Men In Black in droves, and started going to see Looper and Cosmopolis in greater numbers, we'd have a better balance. I honestly think The Avengers is part of the problem. I liked it, but $1.5B??? It just gives the studios little reason to stop making movies for retarded 13 year old boys. Not that The Avengers wasn't well made, but for every well made comic book film, Hollywood becomes like a gambling addict in Vegas, and just starts throwing dice with a blind fold on. And very little of that massive box office take goes to financing more Loopers, The Master, Cosmopolis...those guys have to BEG for money (and usually have to find overseas financing instead of studio money), and considering the studios are making huge profits, you would think they'd finance more challenging films (and I don't mean Oscar bait, and quirky indie borefests...I'm talking stuff that pushes the medium like the films I just mentioned). One Avengers success could finance a dozen Masters or Loopers. But it doesn't work that way. If it DID, I would be more than happy to keep supporting these huge mainstream movies.
