The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/the-new-literalism-plaguing-todays-biggest-movies

by frogulis • 1 year ago

231 440 1 year ago

newyorker.com

krukah• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/ZVQvK

AIorNot• 1 year ago

Eh, People on their phones can’t be bothered with following plot lines everything has to be telegraphed

bluefirebrand• 1 year ago

I think it is just as likely the other way around

People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it

brokencode• 1 year ago

If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.

No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.

The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.

jll29• 1 year ago

Go to a restaurant and watch any "romantic" couple, what they do. Pay attention to each other, talk? Nah, stare at their own screens, and every two minutes or so show each other a cute cat video and go "awww!"; pathetic.

anonymousab• 1 year ago

everything has to be telegraphed

Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

Not that I was lacking reasons to nit resubscribe to Netflix but wow...

bawolff• 1 year ago

Or, people who want complex plots dont watch blockbuster films; they watch indie movies.

The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.

The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.

icecreamscoop4• 1 year ago

Fry: Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.

Futurama nailed it.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

It's a shame, because in an era when One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Annie Hall were winning Best Picture the blockbuster film and "indie" film were harder to differentiate.

hosh2• 1 year ago

I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.

Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.

phyzome2• 1 year ago

"Telegraph" is a bit of an unfortunate word because when used metaphorically it has come to have two almost diametrically opposed meanings. I think that's what's tripping you up.

zoklet-enjoyer2• 1 year ago

Most movies are pretty bad. Always have been. I feel like I got scammed for paying to see 28 Years Later.

plantwallshoe• 1 year ago

The threequel zombie movie lacked too much subtlety for you?

senectus1• 1 year ago

Quadquel?

There is another (and supposedly final) in January 2026.

jowday• 1 year ago

Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.

F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

F1

Let me guess, an old man Brad Pitt enters the movie screen and says something like: “I’m gonna, I’m gonna… I’m gonna WROOOM! I’m WROOMING!!”?

AlexandrB4• 1 year ago

Yeah, F1 was extremely literal - characters would often describe what's going on in Brad Pitt's head while he's driving. On the other hand, it's a "big, dumb action movie" and at least it took itself seriously and didn't wink at the audience like so many modern blockbusters do.

npteljes4• 1 year ago

What did you expect from 28 Years Later, and what have you got?

zoklet-enjoyer2• 1 year ago

I didn't expect anything after about half an hour into it. The first half hour or so was pretty good. The kid taking his sick mom into a zombie infested area was dumb. The blockade but not sending them supplies and stuff, dumb. Zombie pregnancy. Alpha male zombie roided out. The doctor character in general.

decimalenough2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.

jeffbee• 1 year ago

I see few Americans in the credits. Did you mean absurdly following in the Hollywood style, or are the handful of Americans involved in that film enough to make it "Hollywood"? Genuinely asking. Is Hollywood a place, a process, or a result?

zdragnar• 1 year ago

Very little of "Hollywood" is about the place today. Movies are often filmed outside of it for tax purposes. Referencing it is almost always about either the style or the clique of people who engender the style.

TimorousBestie• 1 year ago

Without spoiling the twist, I question whether it’s “over the top.” The specific kind of anxiety alluded to by Conclave about popes is almost a thousand years old and has resurged several times.

boredhedgehog3• 1 year ago

The guy is actually way too unspecific about the details there to make much sense of the canonical relevance, which renders the resulting anxiety rather comical.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

Great acting, great filming, awful ending.

boredhedgehog3• 1 year ago

It wasn't just the ending. Any time a priest casually breaks the seal of the confessional and nobody bats an eye, it creates this weird surreal effect where you can't even tell if the author is aware of what he's doing.

timeon2• 1 year ago

absurdly Hollywood

Happy-end with sequel hook?

Induane2• 1 year ago

And called out the second part of Dune as a bad film. It got written off as simply a "sci-fi sequel"; I think for that movie in particular it is more fair to say that doing the book justice couldn't be done in a single film as the source material is extraordinarily dense.

LOTR is a fascinating counter example; each book is quite dense but was able to be made into a single (albeit long) film. Part of that I think is because a lot of the density of those books is exquisite detailing of the animated natural world of the books; a picture is worth a thousand words may be obnoxiously overused but apropos in this case. The movies seemed to understand the animate life force of the visual landscape and so were able to say a lot visually.

I just don't see Dune: Part II as a true sequel in the traditional sense of the term (though perhaps the literal sense of the term, despite literalism being apparently despised by the articles author).

justaj2• 1 year ago

...but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it)...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FS7MH5oeW74

wnevets• 1 year ago

I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.

Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs

eviks• 1 year ago

How are language/nuances relevant to the sword/trump tower label examples?

And the second example makes it harder by referencing a bell and an exchange

burnt-resistor8• 1 year ago

The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.

mvieira38• 1 year ago

Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development

muglug• 1 year ago

Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.

Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.

aspenmayer• 1 year ago

Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.

1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.

Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.

Ebert said it best:

Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich

burnt-resistor8• 1 year ago

Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich!

monkeyelite3• 1 year ago

Being John Malkovich is film for film people.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

The only thing I remember from Good Will Hunting was Elliot Smith's soundtrack, ha ha.

somenameforme2• 1 year ago

Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

3eb7988a1663• 1 year ago

I assumed those box office records were also dependent upon global ticket sales vs domestic.

Still, surprising statistics.

vasco3• 1 year ago

Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.

somenameforme2• 1 year ago

I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.

But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.

I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...

giantg2• 1 year ago

Drive-ins are nice in smaller towns

boesboes• 1 year ago

Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers

hinterlands2• 1 year ago

All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.

IAmBroom4• 1 year ago

In fact... it looks like they've slightly dropped.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/14kznfv/movie_ti...

litter412• 1 year ago

oh wow, Covid really spell the death of movie theaters, and it's never going to recover.

IAmBroom4• 1 year ago

ONLY because of streaming services. The industry exploded after the 1918 flu.

PaulHoule5• 1 year ago

In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.

api2• 1 year ago

I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.

On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.

pjc504• 1 year ago

more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture

Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.

In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.

detourdog2• 1 year ago

Riffing on your SpongeBob comments.

It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.

Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.

They are hampering discoverability.

askafriend• 1 year ago

Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.

raincole• 1 year ago

I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.

gilbetron2• 1 year ago

Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.

corimaith• 1 year ago

Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.

busterarm3• 1 year ago

Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.

The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.

How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)

That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.

MangoToupe• 1 year ago

My social circle is into afrobeats and amapiano and, to a much lesser extent, american film. I think people just gravitate towards their niche.

RickJWagner• 1 year ago

When movies are made for entertainments sake, they can still do well. ( Top Gun 2, for example ).

I’m really looking forward to the Space Balls sequel. I have hopes that one will be good.

fbrchps• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, Top Gun 2 was not "for entertainment's sake" it was another round of US military advertising/propaganda, just like the first one.

timeon2• 1 year ago

If movie needs number to be distinguishable then it is probably not good.

gonzo41• 1 year ago

The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film. Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.

2muchcoffeeman• 1 year ago

I'd be fine with the length if they actually used the time for something good.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

What about all the lower budget 1-5M contemporary films from the 90s? There's no new directors like Kevin Smith / Quinten Tarantino anymore.

isodev• 1 year ago

I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.

So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.

RationPhantoms• 1 year ago

What was the short?

schnable• 1 year ago

Yes, and "prestige tv" took off, shifting a lot of viewing to 100 hour TV series.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.

Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.

I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.

Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.

deafpolygon• 1 year ago

There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.

2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.

The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.

Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.

MisterBastahrd• 1 year ago

Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.

ajmurmann2• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.

I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.

I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.

Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.

cultofmetatron2• 1 year ago

Yes the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema

I recently got a a pair of XR glasses (ray neo 3). Pretty much replicates the full cinema experience. Only downside is it isn't a shared experience.

toast0• 1 year ago

Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.

IMAX broadened the licensing about 10-15 years ago. I'm not an IMAX person, but people who are complained a lot about it at the time.

qoez2• 1 year ago

I genuinely without rose colored glasses think the obvious explanations is true which is that movies simply became worse since 2002 vs now. Look at the movies released 1999 vs 2024 and the reason fewer people go out to watch them is obvious

JohnFen• 1 year ago

That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.

zamadatix9• 1 year ago

In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.

Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.

ghaff4• 1 year ago

And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.

When I was an undergrad ages ago, going to the on-campus movies were a non-trivial part of the weekend experience. My understanding is that they're mostly dead at this point.

nozzlegear2• 1 year ago

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be.

So now we just wait for a movie we want to see to become available on Apple TV, and then we rent it.

ToucanLoucan2• 1 year ago

^ All of that, and the COST. The last time the wife and I did a movie night for a big new flick we were excited about, we spent almost $80 when all was said and done for tickets and snacks for the TWO OF US!

Fucking absurd.

x0x02• 1 year ago

Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.

rightbyte3• 1 year ago

Why do you bring up 4:3 as a bad property? Honestly I find watching 4:3 easier on the eyes and mind since you know where to look.

owlninja• 1 year ago

Plus the 30 minutes of previews and messages from the theater.

pixl97• 1 year ago

Also it doesn't take skipping many movies now to be able to put a decent sound system with your 50"+ TV.

There are still some fun things to do at particular theaters, like Twisters in 4dx. But there is little compelling reason to otherwise.

privatelypublic• 1 year ago

This doesn't account for the decline starting in 2002. I'd like to see piracy numbers though- particularly the "official" mppa and riaa numbers

shaky-carrousel3• 1 year ago

Nah, I don't buy this. In 2002 your "low quality DVD" was peak quality for us. Same way the blocky renders of PS1 was peak video-gaming for us. It only looks low quality when compared with today. For us at the time, it was magnificent.

busterarm3• 1 year ago

I put almost $20k into a home theater setup. And with what I bought and how I set it up it punches way above its weight. I only have to wait 3 weeks to 3 months to be able to watch a movie at home now. Why would I go to a theater!?

I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.

freejazz5• 1 year ago

Okay, what happened in 2003 then?

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

Movies had a century as one of the main stages for global culture.

That era is ending, and other things are replacing them, mostly based on computers and internet.

If you love movies this is sad, but movies once replaced other beloved things.

The world spins on and nothing is forever. Enjoy the ride!

mjd2• 1 year ago

Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome.

And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

Even within the medium there was a whole generation of beloved silent-film stars that didn't make the transition to talkies. Every era has a beginning and an end.

BizarroLand4• 1 year ago

I think within the next 20 years we will see the rise of AI generated movies custom fit for your pleasure that will contain information to educate you, images to astound you, a story that will pluck at your heart strings and that you will be able to personally influence by your words and choices and reactions.

They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.

isk5173• 1 year ago

A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

snozolli2• 1 year ago

1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.

There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.

Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.

kgwgk• 1 year ago

it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

Right, there are only so many walls to paint in a cave…

ks2048• 1 year ago

because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

hinkley• 1 year ago

Somewhere, Cameron admits he rereleased Avatar to theaters ahead of Avatar 2 so it would beat Endgame. He only needed 8 million more to stay on top, he got 134.

kldavis4• 1 year ago

2002 doesn't look like the interesting year to me. It seems like 2020 and the pandemic is where the most significant drop happened. So we're really looking at post pandemic recovery since that time. How much of the lower numbers are due to theater closures and / or high inflation since then?

idoubtit• 1 year ago

Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.

Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).

"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...

It's still not the same as the cinema experience.

But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.

Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.

bityard• 1 year ago

I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.

It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.

Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.

So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.

bombcar• 1 year ago

Most still do cursorily check tickets (sometimes at the concession stand itself) but they’d probably almost prefer you buy popcorn and no ticket.

duderific• 1 year ago

That's weird. Where I am, if you buy tickets online you get a QR code. At the theater, there's someone in front who scans your QR code and gives you a physical ticket. That ticket is not really checked, but there is always someone there paying attention to folks walking in.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

Movie studios could care less if a billion people watch a movie or if 1 person sees it.

They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.

If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?

Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM

qoez2• 1 year ago

It's an even worse curve if you'd account for the huge population growth since 2002.

merelysounds• 1 year ago

Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

This looks incorrect, at least according to Wikipedia; its list of films by box office admissions[1] includes a few Chinese movies from the 1980s with higher numbers.

Unless the 80s don’t count as modern times - but I’d say it’s not that far from the 90s.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_by_box_office_...

acjohnson55• 1 year ago

There's a lot of debate in this thread about the merits of watching movies in the theater vs home, but my overall movie watching is way down, regardless of venue. I'm sure I watch less than one movie per month. I used to watch tons when I was younger.

Unrelated, I wish there were small screening theaters where small groups of people could watch films on-demand, drawing on a massive catalog.

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

Interestingly enough, this varies a lot between countries.

Also, you graph is way too short-sighted to say it “peaked in 2002”, as in reality it peaked in the 50s (before TV went ubiquitous) when almost ten times as many tickets were sold.

oDot• 1 year ago

There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.

My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.

The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igz7TmsE1Mk

gamblor956• 1 year ago

Readers actually enjoy "on the nose" dialogue...depending on the genre.

A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.

Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)

burnt-resistor8• 1 year ago

watched in the background while people are doing something else.

There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."

There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.

* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.

pixelfarmer• 1 year ago

The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.

The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.

The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.

Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.

pjc504• 1 year ago

Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.

Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.

Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.

burnt-resistor8• 1 year ago

I noticed American shows and movies demographically aimed primarily at kids often slip in cultural references and subtle dirty jokes aimed at keeping older people engaged. Was or is this still a thing in your domain?

pjc504• 1 year ago

Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.

I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?

BobaFloutist11• 1 year ago

Frankly American superhero comics also have(/had) notoriously ex positive dialogue. I feel like it has its DNA in classic pulp books, which, like comics and shonen, are long form stories in a short form format, which can't rely on their readers having read the previous issue(s) (or sometimes just want to refresh memories because it's been a while).

TV these days has recaps, I recently read the third book in a fantasy trilogy that tried a recap, but '"Ok, but what are we going to do about the dark lord?' The dark lord, Jathaniel, had turned out to be the actual murderer of Pomme, Gam's dad, who we had all thought committed suicide. He was seeking the crystals of wonder..." is still very common in modern books. Comics and cartoons are expected to have much less narration, so they tend to put refreshers like this in dialogue. Movies do that to make themselves feel like comics or cartoons. I'm not sure why non comic or cartoon movies do that.

inky-solver• 1 year ago

Oh nooooooo sincerity bad. Got it.

(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)

icecreamscoop4• 1 year ago

What do you mean by "sincerity"?

npteljes4• 1 year ago

I think literal meaning here is misinterpreted as sincerity by OP. Which is a misconception, literal things can be untruthful and abstract things can be truthful as well, being abstract, or going in a roundabout way is not necessarily about being dishonest.

Duanemclemore7• 1 year ago

I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.

Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"

I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.

Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."

- HL Mencken

justanotherjoe3• 1 year ago

Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it.

And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.

Duanemclemore7• 1 year ago

Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.

This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."

I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.

[0] https://killjamesbond.com/

PaulHoule5• 1 year ago

One one level I really enjoy Steven Spielberg, but boy is he heavy handed.

beowulfey• 1 year ago

One might argue that it is the same thing, but that Jurassic Park comes from an era before that was common. It would be a different, though related, point in favor of the duplicative nature of media today to the one the author mentions.

AlexandrB4• 1 year ago

Part of it is overexposure. The same thing happened to snappy "Joss Whedon" dialogue. This stuff worked really well in Buffy and Firefly, but Whedon was good at writing dialogue like this and he knew when not to use it. We've now had 15+ years of various writers at Disney doing crappy Whedon impersonations and this style of dialogue has worn out its welcome for many.

marcosdumay2• 1 year ago

Well, that's people repeating the line for confirmation in a scenario where communications weren't very reliable and the information was extraordinary.

That's close to the way the conversation would happen in real life.

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

That's not a punch line, it is Dr Grant babbling in disbelief that they actually created a T-rex

burnt-resistor8• 1 year ago

the intelligence of the [..] masses

George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.

woolion• 1 year ago

No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...

I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it. At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.

marcosdumay2• 1 year ago

I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence

That phrase is about conning people...

Duanemclemore7• 1 year ago

I would suggest some shades of meaning on the Mencken quote. You're absolutely right that showing contempt for your audience will -absolutely- pave the road to losing money. In contrast if you -pander- to the lowest common denominator of intelligence required for engagement? Money printer go brrrrr.

icecreamscoop4• 1 year ago

I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)

satvikpendem• 1 year ago

Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...

WalterBright• 1 year ago

I just wish they'd cease using the two-strip Technicolor orange-and-blue.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.

Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”

Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.

It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.

Doxin4• 1 year ago

People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.

A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:

'Cause I know you're poison
You're feedin' me poison
Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
Up your poison

The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.

But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

1. People are indeed stupid. I don't understand why there's so much belief in human intelligence while there's so much proof of the contrary

2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.

3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.

wat100003• 1 year ago

Just look at how often political campaigns use songs that sound like upbeat patriotic anthems, but are the total opposite if you actually listen to the words. Using "Born in the USA" for a "woo America!" rally is rather awkward. And of course it's not a new thing; Reagan used that song four decades ago.

watwut6• 1 year ago

The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice. All good artists know that and intentionally manipulate that. This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.

From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships. As in, they make choice to stay, despite knowing this is bad for them. I did not found sexual assault visuals, only abstract video with words and pink colors. The lyrics do not come across to me as "not putting on any kid gloves", they are gentle. They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.

You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.

There are songs that make me feel weird about liking them, but not this one. This one was intentionally made to make me like it.

I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.

alexey-salmin2• 1 year ago

For the less enlightened of us, what is the joke?

PaulHoule5• 1 year ago

There doesn't have to be a joke. If you're rich enough people feel like they have to laugh at your jokes whether or not they are funny. That's the saddest thing about Elon Musk.

I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.

npteljes4• 1 year ago

The way I read it, the joke is just owning the insult in a good way.

It works here on multiple levels, because first, owning the insult is not expected, so that's already a surprise, which can work as a joke.

Then, by actually admitting to the many bad classes, it signals that the author can actually tell good from bad, implying knowledge about the matter after all, refuting the argument in the insult (that he is bad in philosophy because he had bad philosophy classes).

Third, it's a very short, snappy response, in vein of the insult, making the author look competent.

uniq7• 1 year ago

First I thought it was just a simple witty canned response ala Han Solo, and got confused of why we were elevating it to the level of joke that required to be understood by someone intelligent.

Then, as a non English native speaker, I thought it was a word play ("you have had a bad Phil o Sophie ass" + "I had too many" or something).

Then, reading the responses to your comment, found it was the witty canned response I originally thought all along...

wat100003• 1 year ago

I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.

Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.

riffraff• 1 year ago

Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".

It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.

We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.

litter412• 1 year ago

Well I think that movie is great for reasons other than being abstract.

seydor• 1 year ago

Somewhere in the 2000s a lot was lost, after all the best selling movies at the time were literally children's tales.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

I would put the downward trend beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

qgin• 1 year ago

It’s kind of disingenuous to lead with an example from Megalopolis like it represents something about the culture.

bentt• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

This. Also, long-form high-budget "tv" on streaming services is a better way to tell longer, more interesting stories. See eg "The Expanse" (based on the phenomenal novels by James SA Corey).

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

Are the streaming films without "Literalism"?

gooseus• 1 year ago

Gonna take this opportunity to recommend Sovereign.

Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.

ogurechny2• 1 year ago

You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.

Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).

A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.

jerf• 1 year ago

The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.

And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.

That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.

But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.

It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.

neuroelectron2• 1 year ago

New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.

Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.

mpalmer• 1 year ago

"I don't have to read or argue with this, it's automatically bad because uh elitism"

Now that's what I call a luxury belief!

antognini• 1 year ago

That's not exactly what is meant by luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs aren't simply beliefs that rich people hold. It more refers to social opinions which would (allegedly) impose high costs on the poor, but from which the wealthy would be insulated from the consequences. Something like "defund the police" is usually pointed to as an example of a luxury belief. The poor, who live in high crime areas, would see crime go up and bear the brunt of the consequences. Whereas the rich, who live in pricey, low crime neighborhoods, wouldn't see much of a change and would be able to afford private security anyhow if they did.

neuroelectron2• 1 year ago

It's a luxury belief in the sense that they're in a position to have an impact on the zeitgeist. People have been complaining about bad movies for a while now but now The New Yorker has an opinion. The rest of us proles can't afford Broadway. We get what we're served.

dfxm123• 1 year ago

I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.

This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

Not disagreeing with the economics behind it, but this movie-goer walked away decades ago when the "super hero" genre became Hollywood's focus.

Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.

Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.

Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.

Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.

While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.

Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.

parodysbird• 1 year ago

movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator

That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).

boogieknite4• 1 year ago

we made darn near the same comment. interesting Serpell called out Anora specifically

boogieknite4• 1 year ago

Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down

Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis

thegrim33• 1 year ago

What was complicated at all about Oppenheimer?

Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?

From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.

They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.

jodrellblank3• 1 year ago

"Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies"

Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality deep sci-fi. It's a comedy but not full of jokes or skilled physical humor, mostly 'random' silliness. It's a drama but the characters are shallow 2D people with one attribute each, all done in a Disneyfied "bagel with everything!" style.

In the way that Bella in Twilight is a placeholder for the everywoman reader[2]. Compare The Substance which is beating you over the head with "Society treats ageing women badly" but is not a movie for everyone - the topic is of interest to fewer people, the nudity and the physical body horror and gore will turn away a large section of potential audience. There's not much action or chase scenes like Everything Everywhere tries to throw in, and there's no happy ending like EEAAO either.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-so-random-lol-so-random-so...

[2] https://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight

api2• 1 year ago

Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.

Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.

I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

I suspect the writers are doing exactly what they're being paid to do.

monkeyelite3• 1 year ago

Most of this writers points are ideas recently circulating around twitter.

phyzome2• 1 year ago

It's almost as if when one person is reacting to a trend, other people are also reacting to it!

monkeyelite3• 1 year ago

Then one would hope they have a new point to make. I don’t need them to read twitter for me

aqme28• 1 year ago

Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.

buildingsramen• 1 year ago

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.

Barrin92• 1 year ago

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.

briangriffinfan2• 1 year ago

I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.

dmonitor• 1 year ago

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...

boscillator• 1 year ago

I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.

S0y• 1 year ago

it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible.

The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.

A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".

biophysboy• 1 year ago

The art house vs blockbuster dichotomy has existed for a while, but I do think the internet as a medium makes it hard to have truly individual opinions. The whole point of reviews is to surrender a bit of your judgment, but this is more dangerous when the reviewer is an aggregate group. Lots of dogpiling, etc.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable,

Wait... I've never seen it. Don't tell me the ship sinks!

alchemyzach• 1 year ago

I agree. The article feels like it's onto something but ultimately fails to say anything new.

The opinion that most movies are dumb, and only a few of them respect their audience and are worthy of awards and praise, has been true for as long as movies have existed

trosi• 1 year ago

Audiences are increasingly distracted when watching movies and TV shows: the scripts have to be literal.

mrkeen• 1 year ago

It could be the other way around. There may not be anything worth paying attention to.

hanlonsrazor• 1 year ago

I have definitely noticed the same occurring in North American cinema, but I do not think this is a new phenomenon. Rather, it's just a symptom of the increased commercialization of indie cinema - commercialization requiring film for all to understand.

If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.

mpol• 1 year ago

a symptom of the increased commercialization

If it's about what people want to see, could it be that people cannot deal with insecurity anymore? We cannot deal with not knowing. We have to know for sure, so we can feel secure.

BobaFloutist11• 1 year ago

I can't speak for others, but I have a pretty limited tolerance for very explicit, heavy depictions of violence, for bad things happening to animals, or for downer endings.

I fully recognize that these don't make for bad cinema. I also recognize that they're often more effective as surprises. But they are going to dramatically cut into how much I enjoy a movie. And movies aren't like books, where if the tone isn't quite what you're in the mood for you just stop reading, they're more immediately confrontational, and backing out is a bigger deal (and almost a faux pas, walking out of a movie is seen as commentary on its quality). Previews are also going to avoid spoiling twists or dramatic moments, which, again, makes sense, but makes them poor tools for assessing tone. This means I'm often tempted to read the plot summary before watching, which feels silly, but if I want to challenge myself and watch things not quite to my taste and things that aren't just kid's movies without just sometimes paying for the pleasure of having a bad time, I'm not sure how else to approach it.

It also feels like other people have almost the opposite perspective, where of a movie doesn't have something really emotionally heavy or challenging to watch they can't take it seriously. I'm not sure what makes sense here, and maybe my tastes are just the problem, but it feels bad to spend fifteen dollars and two hours of my time to be in a space that's too loud, has only very expensive food, and leave depressed by what feels to be to be an overly cynical or myopic message or an artistic vision obsessively depicting the many ways human beings can be physically harmed, in as much detail as possible. Again, I don't think it's bad or wrong, I certainly don't want it to be banned or require disclosure, I just struggle to decide where I fit in the market, and I worry that my purchasing patterns support a narrative that leads to less of what I want.

PyWoody2• 1 year ago

For other relatively recent movies I'd add:

  > Evil Does Not Exist
  > Godland
  > The Beast
  > The Worst Person in the World
  > Misericordia
  > The Banshees of Inisherin
  > Amanda [0]
  > Afire [1]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18469872/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26440619/

jsbg• 1 year ago

are movies like Evil Does Not Exist as popular in Japan as the examples in the article though? there must be a lot of similar niche movies made in the US

idontwantthis• 1 year ago

I thought Banshees of Inisherin was quite literal. Two Irish friends are screaming at each other while a literal civil war is going on around them.

I found it pretty disappointing for that reason compared to McDonagh’s other movies which are much less literal.

s28l• 1 year ago

I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through.

It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)

wahnfrieden• 1 year ago

It ends with one

dfxm123• 1 year ago

Yeah, I can see where the author is coming from, but it's kinda effortless to dismiss a ~2hr movie with a five sentence critique of a few scenes or lines of dialog. I'd much rather see the author go deep on one movie than shallowly take on a bunch.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

For Gladiator II specifically, you might enjoy this:

https://acoup.blog/2024/12/06/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...

https://acoup.blog/2024/12/13/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...

istjohn• 1 year ago

A couple examples the author gave sounded plausible--though I hadn't seen the movies in question--but then I felt the author was beginning to reach.

It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.

Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.

This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.

No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.

Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.

BobaFloutist11• 1 year ago

Yes, you are clearly also very educated. Impressive use of language!

I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.

I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.

Flatcircle3• 1 year ago

so true

tomasphan• 1 year ago

I agree, its for the same reason that trailers now have little trailers in the beginning. I mean really, a trailer for a trailer? Apparently its required to keep retention up because even adults are now children that need to be spoon fed.

immibis• 1 year ago

That sounds like a different issue. With low quality "information" thrust at people from all sides, you have to immediately prove that you're not just AI slop video #63547, because I'm seeing your video on a platform that mostly delivers AI slop that I will scroll past within 3 seconds.

Why am I on a platform that mostly delivers slop? That's a trillion dollar question. The advertising industry won.

Also because if I was on a non-slop platform, it wouldn't be showing me your ad because ads are slop.

shayway• 1 year ago

Ah, a New Yorker article on media. I think I got bingo!

  - Identify some problem pervading modern pop media? Check
  - Cherry pick examples? Check
  - Misrepresent or misunderstand an example that actually supports the opposite claim? Check
  - Paint a vague picture of how much better it was before [trend], without making any real statement? Check
  - Don't use any actual data or evidence? Check
  - Draw a line from dumb blockbuster trends to Trump/Nazis/[insert hot-button political issue]? Check

You either come into the article ready to believe movies are getting worse or you don't. You come away feeling vindicated, or angry. There is nothing of substance here.

dkarl2• 1 year ago

I think what this means is that the movies now care whether the least-common-denominator viewers get their "point."

Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it.

Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The ability to attach multiple meanings, even multiple conflicting meanings, was seen as an inevitable aspect of art that should be embraced and engaged with. It was accepted that people would see a different movie depending on their background, their personal history, and their awareness of cinematic language. Supporting multiple readings was seen as a sign of depth and complexity, not necessarily a weakness.

Now the movies take a pragmatic, engineered approach to delivering a message. Ambiguity must be squashed. Viewer differences must be made irrelevant. The message takes precedence over art.

I think the interesting question is, why does the message now take precedence over everything else? What has changed? I see two possible answers.

First possibility, the audience demands a message. If the least-common-denominator viewer demands a message, and you are in the business of servicing that demand, you have to make sure you avoid any possible mishaps or misunderstandings in the delivery.

Second possibility, the makers of movies derive some personal satisfaction or social gain from broadcasting a message to the masses. They see the movies as propaganda rather than art. (Or perhaps a less active motivation: the makers of movies are afraid that there might be blowback from viewers attaching an unsavory meaning to a movie. They want to make sure that their movie doesn't become like Fight Club, a proudly embraced symbol of what it was meant to critique.)

Either of these would explain why movies are now engineered to deliver a single, unmistakable message at the expense of art and enjoyability. Or maybe there's another explanation. I'm just spitballing. I'd love to read more by somebody close enough to actually know what they're talking about.

AlexandrB4• 1 year ago

One interesting example here is Joker. It seems like the filmmakers did not like the audience they attracted with the first film, nor the messages that this audience took away. So the sequel seems like it was intentionally designed to piss that audience off.

slg2• 1 year ago

The Matrix is an earlier and I think more impactful example of this. That is a movie made by two trans filmmakers and with hindsight it is clearly an exploration of their own identities. Yet somehow it has been co-opted by people with diametrically opposed political and gender ideologies[1]. That has to be incredibly frustrating as an artist and I bet many people have seen that sort of reaction and go out of their way to make it more difficult for people to be that wrong about their art.

[1] https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...

dkarl2• 1 year ago

I think I agree with that. It was not the first movie where I remember talking with people who said that it was a bad movie because it could be interpreted in a harmful way. However, it was the first movie where that seemed to be the prevailing opinion in my social group. People complained about toxic readings of the movie, and when I asked them how well they thought those readings were supported by the movie, and what readings they personally took away from it, they wouldn't answer those questions, because they regarded them as distractions from the more important phenomenon of toxic people enjoying the movie.

DoneWithAllThat• 1 year ago

I am 100% of the opinion that it’s (2), in no small part because the writers themselves say as much frequently and vociferously at every opportunity. This isn’t reading some hidden meaning, this is just listening to what they say when they’re interviewed.

The two most common themes I hear from writers are intense narcissism, feeling deeply their own personal experience is something anyone else should care about, and activism/social justice/messaging, where they’re pushing a particular political narrative. It’s why we’ve seen the death of truly morally ambiguous characters or even antiheroes - they threaten the clear and unambiguous message the writer wants to send. Stories aren’t for the audience to interpret but for the writer to preach.

And again this isn’t inference. This is reading and watching interviews with writers, showrunners, producers, etc.

lupire4• 1 year ago

Audiences are intensely more political nowadays. They want that.

ctoth• 1 year ago

Might it be as simple as: before, the LCD viewer who didn't get it had no platform, now they do? Responsiveness to Rotten Tomatoes instead of Roger Ebert?

snozolli2• 1 year ago

There are a lot of things that bother me in recent movies. I feel like there's a "yay, we're making a movie!" attitude, where people are more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture rather than simply doing their job to the best of their ability.

The most egregious example is the amount of Wilhelm Screams I've heard, absolutely crammed into media. It's a proclamation of, "I'm a sound editor, and I'm in on the joke!" but all it does is pull me out of the story completely.

Another sound editor example is the amount of ice clinking in glasses and sloshing sounds of drinks, as if the protagonist's long-neck beer bottle is a half-empty jug being jerked around.

Impressive stunts are virtually non-existent now. Instead, they drive a custom-built, tubular-frame car, swerving wildly, while the camera jerks around on a crane. Everything is reskinned using CGI, and the end result is the desired car being driven by an apparent maniac who chooses a profoundly sub-optimal path through traffic.

Writers have to point out their cleverness in order to announce to the audience how clever they're being. It reminds me of eye-rollingly clever newspaper headlines.

Everything has been turned up to 11, but in the lamest way possible.

cal85• 1 year ago

more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture

So true! This feeling is everywhere in movies now.

CyberDildonics• 1 year ago

Pretentious nonsense is plaguing the newyorker.

dmix• 1 year ago

I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down, the examples were all over the place.

kikokikokiko3• 1 year ago

It's a NewYorker article, what did you expect? I personally find anything writen there basically unreadable.

frogulis• 1 year ago

I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down

By the sounds of it, the author would be okay with that!

jihadjihad• 1 year ago

Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.

I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.

Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.

Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.

kikokikokiko3• 1 year ago

Birdman's ending is atrocious, but the main problem ain't even there. The movie is just a giant pile of pretentious nothingness, I can't even remember what was the point of it. Hollywood movies from the last 2 decades or so are just disposable.

Induane2• 1 year ago

Hey, I kinda enjoyed Birdman!

dartharva• 1 year ago

The kind of criticism this author is imposing, I honestly feel like it could be applied to every movie ever if you were nitpicky enough.

the_af• 1 year ago

I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".

I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.

As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.

whycome• 1 year ago

Here’s the thing. For all the movies that have tired tropes and blatant literalism, there’s a new movie watcher that hasn’t experienced it before. They have the same right to watching a new movie with a tired trop — because to them, it’s not yet tired.

RiverCrochet• 1 year ago

Given these three things:

- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.

- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.

- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.

it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.

It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.

I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?

Matthyze• 1 year ago

There are movie critics that go on a rollercoaster ride and then complain about a lack of subtext

rezmason• 1 year ago

This phenomenon isn't exclusive to film or even fiction.

A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.

A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."

And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.

I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.

That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.

thiht• 1 year ago

Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.

Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?

wonderwonder3• 1 year ago

It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore. The last time I remember watching a movie and thinking "That was pretty good" was the Dune films. Before that I can't even remember. I watched Thunderbolts and remember I thought it was the first Marvel movie that wasn't just terrible since End Game and that was primarily due to the Russian guy as a comedy source.

haunter2• 1 year ago

It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore

There are plenty of good films out there. Ignore Hollyood, broaden your horizon

wonderwonder3• 1 year ago

I'm open to suggestions...

Flatcircle3• 1 year ago

That article felt eerily like AI writing. Lots of words and few ideas, and the ideas they had were poorly explained...

Bizarre.

watwut6• 1 year ago

The most fascinating achievement of AI is that so many people became convinced that humans were flawless creators just 3 years ago.

Flatcircle3• 1 year ago

This article is not professionally written. Somebody get this writer an editor

Lerc2• 1 year ago

The Wachowski's once commented that the Red Pill movement was a message to them telling them to never be subtle again.

Another data point. Most people seem to think that replicants are detected because they are unemotional.

I would prefer filmmakers not assume the least of their audiences, but I would also rather that audiences not give them reason to.

smt88• 1 year ago

The creator of The Boys has also said he needs to beat people over the head so he doesn't have a similar situation to Mad Men or Breaking Bad, where people think the main character is a hero to emulate

Lerc2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I guess The same problem exists with The Watchmen and Fight Club.

I found it fascinating how the term snowflake was changed because the character that people admired told their proxies that they were not snowflakes. The meaning at the time was that they were homogenous and unremarkable. Snowflakes represented the opposite where each individual snowflake has a unique pattern. That viewpoint was not empowering so they took the metaphor to be about the fragility of snowflakes.

rbanffy5• 1 year ago

It was hilarious when the far-right noticed, IIRC on season 3 of The Boys, that they were being mocked.

And just look at all Star Wars fans cosplaying as stormtroopers. It even says “evil empire” in the first movie intro. You can’t get much more obvious than George Lucas.

jtwoodhouse• 1 year ago

This is nothing new. Critics wanna be challenged. Audiences don’t.

rpdillon• 1 year ago

Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content. Fashion capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks: we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth. Image generators churn out ersatz versions of da Vinci and van Gogh. And, in every case, banal commentary is slowly occluding the art, seeping into it in boldface titles or explainers that speak over the sound or cover the image.

It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.

popalchemist• 1 year ago

I've spent 20 years working in Hollywood. This is definitely not anything new, but we are in an up-cycle. Ambiguity is hard to tolerate, in life, in general. Ambiguity is also where personal meaning can arise. However in hard times (economically, culturally, politically, existentially... we're currently in all 4), market forces drive things away from ambiguity and toward one-pointedness. This is reflected in the world of trailers even more clearly than in the world of films - the trailers often specifically highlight exactly the kinds of moments this writer is critiquing, as if the purpose of film is to trade in such moments; the underlying conceit is something like "populist memes are a commodity."

This is what is currently driving pop culture; the commodification of the meme. Movies aspire to be memes - the dominant means of expression and the atomic unit of culture in the present moment.

They used to aspire to be themselves (movies, for their own sake). IMO that ended around 2008. The Dark Knight was the end and Iron Man was the beginning of a new Hollywood cycle; defined by the movie's ability to trade in this currency - memes - which stand alone, isolated, traded out of context of an entire narrative.

Further reading for whoever is interested: Society of the Spectacle by Debord (re: the degradation of being into having, having into mere appearing, as a universal and ubiquitous byproduct of the core function of capital which is commodification)... and Man and His Symbols (re: the difference between a symbol, which is universal and carries a wealth of meaning, and a sign, which is contextual/temporary and carries a fixed meaning).

yndoendo• 1 year ago

Would the void of physical medium like VHS and DVD be part of the issue?

Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.

With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.

ragazzina• 1 year ago

I had not seen a recent movie in quite some time. Recently I went to watch Sinners (2025, critically acclaimed). The movie starts with a voiceover saying:

"There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past and the future..."

Not even an hour passes, and the same exact voiceover repeats word for word that music can conjure spirits from the past and the future, while the scene on screen literally shows music conjuring spirits from the past and the future. It threw me off a little.

Many commenters in this thread point out that on-the-nose-ness in Hollywood movies isn’t new. Personally, I can’t recall a voiceover being repeated verbatim, especially not during the very scene it originally seemed to foreshadow.

red-iron-pine• 1 year ago

There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”

man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker

Sebastian_09• 1 year ago

Quite a bad piece, the end note is ironic: the author doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention for a film critic apparently interested in litteralicity.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”

I cannot see any common denominator in the multiple examples that the author gives and cannot relate to them (what point is there to put on an equal footing a micro analysis of a dialogue in Megalopolis -voluntarily grotesque- and the choice of film format in The Architect?).

Maybe there’s an intuition here, but I feel it is not well illustrated. The author probably hopes that she will be remembered for coining this wishy washy concept.

doka_smoka• 1 year ago

As someone forced to sit through "substance" while the recommender was "yass queening" the whole time, I can confirm that the movie thinks you have an IQ of 75. "Oooh ooh! Men bad! Male gaze only reason women try look sexy! Yes queen slay, Grug owe you attention for living! Western pedo town all problem caused by men look no further"

justaj2• 1 year ago

PSA: Beginning of the article contains spoilers.

jjk166• 1 year ago

Pretty sure for all the examples given at the beginning, these can easily be explained as natural parts of the writing process.

The Gladiator II example is just lampshading. If you just wrote "the prisoner grabbed the weapon the guard brought in to the cell, and then killed the guard with it" the very first thing someone's going to ask is "well why did the guard bring a weapon in?" and then the writer says "oh well he didn't consider it a usable weapon" and then "but clearly it is, so that doesn't really solve anything" and rather than coming up with a better escape method the writer just leans into the absurdity of it - the on the nose dispensing of folksy wisdom establishes that the guard is just an idiot rather than leaving the audience to contemplate the contrived situation.

For Megalopolis, “What do you think of this boner I got?” [he shoots her] isn't exactly a compelling scene when reading it. It makes a lot of sense to punctuate the scene with some emotion to make it make some sort of sense. Can this emotion be shown on film without dialogue? Possibly, but the writer can't be sure how it'll actually look, and they need to convey to both the actor and director what emotion needs to be conveyed. It sounds like placeholder dialogue which could be cut or changed as needed.

For the Apprentice, again the writer likely doesn't know exactly how the scene is going to turn out. Is "Trump Tower" going to be clearly legible on the model as the scene is shot? Do you even want to spoil it by showing the name on the model? The point is this is supposed to be a reveal.

In all three cases, these lines very well could be great with proper setup and delivery, or perhaps could have been reworked into great lines. The issue is just these are mediocre films. None made any serious attempt to polish their scripts. It's not a deliberate tactic to dumb down movies or deal with poor attention spans, it's just the makers of the movie saying "eh, good enough."

sandy_coyote• 1 year ago

I appreciate nuance and depth in art, but I've also become addicted to YouTube explainer channels like Heavy Spoilers. I've concurrently watched multiple explainer channels for all the memorable TV shows I've watched lately, and... I really enjoy this new media age.

I still silently and slowly read novels, but as of now, that's a different media experience. Its slow pace is also enjoyable in a different way.

The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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