In terms of new releases, I have limited myself almost entirely to non-fiction in the last five years. It's just so rare to read a novel that really grips you nowadays. It's truly baffling that authors like Dan Brown or series like the Millennium books were able to become such world-wide hits. We don't have to pretend like every bestseller in the past was a masterpiece, but at the very least most authors could boast some talent and imagination.
Popular culture in its entirety is going through a period of creative anemia. Mainstream cinema and the music industry are possibly in an even worse state talent-wise than literature. And it's likely going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I dread to think what might be shown in movie theaters ten years from now. Perhaps they will shed narrative altogether and just show a series of explosions and one-liners?
I should stop before I tell you all to get the hell off my lawn...
Get that stupid f@cking movie off my lawn. Most cynical, movie-by-accountants, profit-driven, connect-the-dots movie made made in last DECADE... and they made a SEQUEL?
When moves like that make money instead of actual GOOD movies, I weep for cinema.
Bred to fight, born to kill,
Ready to die but never will
Hollywood was taught a lesson in 2010 with one of their highest grossing years ever. If you make movies that are actually worth seeing (Avatar, Dark Knight) people will go to the theaters. Then they promptly forgot it in 2011, one of the lowest grossing years in recent history, because they made shit. Then blamed it on pirates... because they are obviously the problem.
Bred to fight, born to kill,
Ready to die but never will
I used to be a part of that system and finally concluded it had a positive bias toward crap. Sometimes something good sneaks through, but that's become the exception not the rule.
And the economics of mainstream film have tilted further in that direction. They're now so expensive to make (if you haven't got a $100 million to bet you're stuck with the opposite end - straight to cable at $1.5 million or under) that in order to turn a profit, major releases have to fill every possible seat everywhere in the world.
This means that almost nothing that could be considered commercial can carry a rating stronger than PG-13, because you need those teenagers to fill seats. It also has to play in many countries with many languages, which makes the visual component more important than the story. An explosion is an explosion in any language. Thus there is a skew toward action pictures and against anything more sophisticated. Also because of the world market, you need stars known everywhere, whether or not they can act, which explains crapola like Expendables.
These conditions are so daunting they've reduced the entire industry to a few companies spending on a whole lot of money on a tiny number of mediocre projects. Ten years ago, mainstream studios released on average a combined total of about 200 new titles a year. That's down to fifty titles now because of runaway production and marketing costs.
After ten years of trying to do something worthwhile in mainstream, then gave it up and went to porn, where projects get developed in a month instead of two years and every project I work on actually gets made and returns a profit. I get to make real choices in terms of casting, content, location, crew, editing, even input to the marketing campaigns. I meed directly with the guy who writes the check instead of having to hack my way through layers of underlings before I can even get a meeting with someone who has the power to say yes.
True, the budgets are tiny by comparison, but you meet a better class of people in porn.
The only movie I thoroughly enjoyed recently was 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo'. The Help was okay, would have been better if they cast a real actress for the Skeeter role. It doesn't really work to go for a comedic actress for a dramatic role.
Ferres wrote:The only movie I thoroughly enjoyed recently was 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo'. The Help was okay, would have been better if they cast a real actress for the Skeeter role. It doesn't really work to go for a comedic actress for a dramatic role.
Which version, the european film or the american one?
Bred to fight, born to kill,
Ready to die but never will
