Your favorite movie sucks

[lisarea]

I just checked something.

In 1974, of the top ten grossing movies, none I think fit that fantasy-adventure type category, and there was exactly one children's movie (Benji).

In 2014, NINE of the top ten grossing movies were that fantasy-adventure type movie putatively targeted to kids and teenagers. And the one that wasn't? American Sniper.

Setting aside any arguments about the value of juvenile media or the quality of the other stuff on that 1974 list (there is some real crap on there), you can kind of see why so many people are complaining, or at least trying to sort out how and why it's happening.

[Janet]

Thanks for reminding me to share this with you. What Dogme 95 Did for Women Directors was a really interesting read. You will probably want to track down those films if you haven't already seen them.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I just checked something.

In 1974, of the top ten grossing movies, none I think fit that fantasy-adventure type category, and there was exactly one children's movie (Benji).

In 2014, NINE of the top ten grossing movies were that fantasy-adventure type movie putatively targeted to kids and teenagers. And the one that wasn't? American Sniper.

Setting aside any arguments about the value of juvenile media or the quality of the other stuff on that 1974 list (there is some real crap on there), you can kind of see why so many people are complaining, or at least trying to sort out how and why it's happening.

American Sniper appealed to a different demographic of juvenile.

[BrotherMan]

Star Wars: Analyzed by Aliens - Earthling Cinema...

[SharonDee]

Your favorite movie sucks because ... "Everything is awesome!" is one of the worst ear worms to have in your head. (If you don't know what movie I mean, count your blessings!)

[BrotherMan]

It's amazing how Disney (and now the LEGO movie) can make the catchiest tunes that have the worst message.

[Janet]

This doesn't quite fit but I don't feel like resurrecting another movie thread.

Stop Laughing at Old Movies You $@%&ing Hipsters.

[lisarea]

So I don't know. That performance sounds a little bit like maybe it was supposed to cheesy? I certainly wouldn't blame people if they were genuinely amused by parts, or if they thought it was intended to be comedic, just based on the description.

This is a thing that lots of places do. They'll show cheesy movies on purpose for people to laugh at. Here is an upcoming showing near us with a drinking game.

I mean, does that rule apply to Rocky Horror or Birdemic or The Room, or all those other movies that people watch 'ironically'? (Did you know that Rita Mae Brown wrote the screenplay for a movie where a guy kills a bunch of sexy teenagers with a power drill? Because she did.) Should audiences be respectful of those who want to watch those movies all po faced too?

However. I saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon at some multiplex when that came out, and there was a guy sitting behind me who saw fit not to laugh, but to snort derisively at every single instance of baroque physics. He was very loudly harumphing and pssssshing at every single element of over the top choreography.

I could have out-savvied him by letting him know that was a longstanding trope that was used in a lot of movies that were pretty obscure that he had probably never heard of, but I was pretty pissed at him by the time the movie was over, and I wasn't about to engage with him.

But that. That's intentional. That is that guy being performative, letting everyone else know that he was noticing something he assumed they weren't. Which: Dude.

If he'd been genuinely amused and laughing was an organic reaction, I don't think I could fault him for that.

I'm not sure what people are laughing at in Lawrence of Arabia and those. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that, so I really can't say.

That whole article is making me paranoid like I have accidentally ruined someone's enjoyment of the subtle nuances of Slumber Party Massacre.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

It's amazing how Disney (and now the LEGO movie) can make the catchiest tunes that have the worst message.

Except that the tune is subverted in the movie. It's made very evident that this tune comes from and reinforces a world in which promoting conformity and social control are the government's top priorities. That part of The LEGO Movie is a cartoon version of Manufacturing Consent.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by lisarea

So I don't know. That performance sounds a little bit like maybe it was supposed to cheesy? I certainly wouldn't blame people if they were genuinely amused by parts, or if they thought it was intended to be comedic, just based on the description.

That's precisely how it was marketed by the LA Opera. They called it "offbeat" and invoked The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Mystery Science Theater 3000. They even encouraged audience members to come in costume. They were not presenting at the Synthesis of Timeless Cinema and Great Music, still less as a "movie matinee" (I wonder what the author made of the singers and the orchestra: do they usually have those at the matinees she attends?).

If LAO had wanted to do that, they could have done something like a concert performance of Philip Glass' Orphée or La Belle et la Bête alongside a screening of the Cocteau films from which these operas are derived, or screened Ken Russell's The Devils alongside Penderecki's Die Teufel von Loudon. Come to think of it, I'd really like to see the latter happen, especially since Warner Bros. is blocking the North American release of the movie.

[lisarea]

Oh, man. This is some bogglerage.

Women invented narrative cinema. They invented the language and the building blocks of filmmaking. Men only got in the game in numbers once they realized that women were actually onto something, so they came in and started taking credit and forcing women out or onto the sidelines so they could make their boring manvies.

How Hollywood Keeps Out Women | L.A. Weekly

Fortunately, these ladies are standing up for what's right.

#MAKEITFAIR - YouTube

[livius drusus]

From the LA Weekly article:

Between 1949 and 1979, the robust female talent behind the cameras all but disappeared. To watch films was to see a world made up of men, acting out men's stories financed by men, written by men and filmed by men, with women often thrown in as sidekicks or arm candy. During that 30-year period, just two of every 1,000 films were directed by women — 14 of the 7,332 movies produced in America.

I had no idea the numbers were so low. That means that one of my personal idols, Ida Lupino, directed just short of HALF of all the movies directed by women in 30 years, and the reason any of them happened is because she was a huge, huge badass who while on suspension for refusing to take some shitty role her studio wanted her to take just went and made her own production company, wrote her own scripts and then directed them. Would you care to guess some of the themes she covered? If you guessed rape, abortion, female athletes and bigamy, you're correct. She also directed the first film noir directed by a woman -- The Hitch-Hiker -- and the first movie directed by a woman who also starred in it -- The Bigamist. Fuck the system, man.

[lisarea]

Guh, that is really the main thing I hate about Hollywood, really. It's not just that I specifically dislike the movies or types of movies they make, but that it is so insular and so tightly controlled by people who don't give a shit about anything but making safe investments, and it's so pervasive that it's easy to forget that there's any alternative at all.

I know I've recommended it before, but the thing that makes Mark Cousins' The Story of Film stand out so much is that he doesn't limit himself to Hollywood, or to the standard Western + Japanese film canon that you usually see. So when you see how some people are reacting to #MAKEITFAIR, claiming that women lack the interest or the skill to work in film, it's really apparent that people aren't really aware that there's anything besides Hollywood. There are plenty of women making films and making them well. You just don't hear about them much.

In fact, this is just a general impression and nothing I can prove or anything, but it seems to me that, for such a small minority of filmmakers, women are disproportionately innovative, like a whole lot of movies made by women look way way ahead of their time to me.

I mean, does this look like 1907 to you?

"Le Piano" irresitible Alice Guy - YouTube

Even apart from how she somehow made a music video for What I Say over 50 years before it existed. (It is almost eerie how perfectly it fits, though.) The naturalistic movement, flow, and setting, the way she ties together the action to create a single cohesive story? Just things like pointing to the ceiling or having characters leaving through one door, then cutting to coming in another to create a mental map of the scene were wildly innovative for the time. We take those types of things for granted now, as though they're intuitive, but they weren't really part of the film vocabulary until people, many of them women, created that vocabulary.

[Janet]

Oh my god, I love that film so much! What a hoot!

[lisarea]

RIGHT? I can't even think about her without wanting to pop someone in the nose because I had never even heard of her before this project's Kickstarter.

This is the trailer. Get a taste of my incandescent rage over the fact that I had never heard of her until recently. And that is the kind of thing I pay very close attention to, so if someone had mentioned her, I would have remembered:



And the films of hers I've seen aren't just historically interesting in a technical sense. They're also far superior to the sort of now-iconic movies her male contemporaries (and successors) were making. Also I now think Georges Melies was a big dumb ditchfucker and there is a reason his name is "Me Lies."

If someone like her was nearly written out of history despite her talents and accomplishments, you also have to wonder how many slightly less superhuman filmmakers have been completely obliterated by the Hollywood juggernaut as well.

[lisarea]

Over the past twenty four hours, I have watched:

The Bigamist, because drusus said.

Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue, because Janet said.

Jeanne Dielman, because it has been on my queue for a long time but I keep putting it off.

All were excellent, but Jeanne Dielman was remarkably strange and tedious and awesome, and I want to talk about it mostly because I don't actually recommend it. It's almost 3.5 hours long, and it is almost aggressively boring, which is why I'd been putting it off. The vast majority of the screen time is the main character just doing maintenance type things. Making dinner. Folding things. Washing dishes. All in real time, with no edits or cuts, often multiple times. You have to watch the whole process, and the camera is relatively static, so the room is framed, and she's coming in and out of it, just putting things away, polishing shoes, getting her knitting, putting the knitting away.

And it's a complete departure from the standard male gaze we're used to. I found myself, early on, picking up clues about where the movie was going. Oh, the camera is paying attention to that tablecloth, so it must figure into some plot point later! But that's not it. What it is is changing the focus. In a standard movie setup, this is stuff that happens in the background, sort of like in real life. Women in the background doing maintenance, providing sustenance and continuity, and they only dip into the main focus when they're necessary to further some other, more important goal. But the things she's doing ARE the focus. The movie is about her, and about the things she's doing, and these are the things, so she's foregrounded and her tasks are elevated (literally--the camera is normally at about waist height or so) to the central focus. She also works as a prostitute, so she has clients over, but they're not prioritized over the mending or the grocery shopping or wiping down the table, because they matter about the same. And the pace and consistency have to build up slowly, because it's about that. It takes that much time to lull you into its routine, in part I think because the monotony is central to the movie, but also in part because it's such a radical departure into a female gaze that it takes that long to acclimate.

Anyways, I'm not recommending it unless you're interested enough in meta-narratives like that to watch a woman doing menial chores for about three hours of the movie's runtime, but it was such a radical shift in perspective that I wanted to tell you guys that that movie happened.

Also, from now on, I watch no more manvies. And if anyone here DOES watch a manvie and posts anything about it, I am going to come around all like, "Oh, that is nice! What was it like? Like a normal movie, except for men? Like does it have the regular movie stuff with just more rearranging testicles and hocking loogies around, or is the whole thing, like, they just talk about their poops? Is that Kevin James guy in it? He is in most of those men's films, I think. Did you see the Paul Blart movie he was in? I think you would like it a lot!"

[Stormlight]

Originally Posted by lisarea

"Le Piano" irresitible Alice Guy - YouTube

Please to excuse the derail but:

THIS VIDEO CONTAINS CONTENT FROM MERLIN PIAS, WHO HAS BLOCKED IT IN YOUR COUNTRY ON COPYRIGHT GROUNDS.

How bloody idiotic can this copyright bullshit actually get?

Anyway, please do carry on!

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Stormlight

Please to excuse the derail but:

THIS VIDEO CONTAINS CONTENT FROM MERLIN PIAS, WHO HAS BLOCKED IT IN YOUR COUNTRY ON COPYRIGHT GROUNDS.

How bloody idiotic can this copyright bullshit actually get?

Anyway, please do carry on!

Perhaps Archive.org will work for you?

But yeah, copyright can be pretty ridiculous sometimes. In this case it's because Luxembourg, like the rest of the EU, has Life+70 copyright laws. Since Alice Guy died in 1968, her work will be under European copyright until 2039, even though this film was made in 1907.

However, some things are available to you that aren't available here. We Americans have a copyright expiration of 95 years after the date of copyright for all those works which were copyrighted after 1923 and had their copyrights renewed. So although we have the earliest stories of P. G. Wodehouse (d. 1975), most of the novels of E. M. Forster (d. 1970), and The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (d. 1976) in the public domain, the majority of Virginia Woolf's oeuvre is still in U. S. copyright, as is The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and even Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Foretopman, because it wasn't discovered and published until over four decades after his death.

[lisarea]

HAHAHAHAHAHA a Star Tracks man said your favorite movies suck now also!

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?*

I don't really think the problem is the genre itself. The problem is more just the narrowing field of acceptable narratives, period.

Science fiction is especially worrisome for a couple of reasons, though. One is that Star Wars did have an industry wide influence on Hollywood narratives, to the point that its narrative became something very close to law in the industry as a whole, and even moreso within the genre.

And that narrative, of course, was modeled on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Now, Campbell was definitely onto something when he identified that framework. That is a very common and wide-ranging narrative that popped up independently in all kinds of different cultures worldwide. But it is still just one of an infinite number of possible narratives. It does have broad appeal, obviously. People are drawn to and compelled by that narrative. But the problem comes in in that, because of its broad appeal, it's become dominant to the point of almost being prescriptive. People start seeing alternate narratives as failed attempts at being the narratives they're familiar with, and the hero's journey, along with a handful of other minor narratives, are rapidly becoming the only narratives people are familiar with.

Here is the thing about the hero's journey in particular, though: It's a male narrative. Explicitly. You can plug a female protagonist into it, but its origins were stories about men by men. And when women asked Joseph Campbell about the heroine's journey, he would actually tell them that they didn't have journeys because they were the destination. The destination. Literally objects. The reward at the end of the quest.

And it is that story that has become not just the default narrative of science fiction, but the default narrative of the majority of big budget films, period. And it's practically universal for children's media, which is probably one of the reasons there's such a crossover.

* I actually do appreciate seeing him specifically saying these things. I know that it probably looks like I'm just complaining that popular movies aren't much to my taste and making fun of people who like them, but that is honestly not why. I'm genuinely alarmed at how pervasive and monolithic the media has gotten just in recent years, so I like being able to point to other people who are similarly alarmed. This is actually a pretty big deal that's been happening.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I know that it probably looks like I'm just complaining

[Sock Puppet]

I think "they are the destination" was an overly glib response that covered over his more complex thoughts on the subject. Campbell had a quasi-Jungian notion of women actually being more spiritually complete than men, so that men had to do something to get their dumb asses to a place that women already inhabited. Which is probably just as problematic and wrongheaded as the belief that women are objects to be used, but in a different direction; it still advances the notion that women are unknowable monsters with scary parts and such.

And hell, Campbell wrote about a hell of a lot more than the hero's journey, although in his later years that's all anybody seemed to want to talk to him about. Because of fucking Star Wars. Lucas ruins everything.

As Mr. Pea has covered already, the Star Wars Problem is just a particularly virulent symptom of the underlying disease: the Hollywood aversion to risk and pathological devotion to the safest bets possible. Someone may have already pointed out that Star Wars itself had greenlighting problems at first, because it wasn't enough like previous sci-fi films (such as 2001, which had similar studio bullshit to get through). Films break new ground, and then end up making the problem worse.

How many people thought Silence of the Lambs was a great film, but weren't particularly interested in the topic of serial killers? I'll raise my hand (I can see Mr. Pea saying "Nah, that one sucked too") and wager I wasn't the only one. Yet for fucking years afterward, we got like a couple serial killer movies per month. That's the trend that solidified my disgust for the Hollywood business model. I didn't want more serial killers; I wanted more films with intense performances and clever screenplays. Pick out what you actually liked about a successful film, and almost invariably, the studios pinpointed something completely different, for frustratingly stupid reasons.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

I think "they are the destination" was an overly glib response that covered over his more complex thoughts on the subject. Campbell had a quasi-Jungian notion of women actually being more spiritually complete than men, so that men had to do something to get their dumb asses to a place that women already inhabited. Which is probably just as problematic and wrongheaded as the belief that women are objects to be used, but in a different direction; it still advances the notion that women are unknowable monsters with scary parts and such.

Oh, yeah, Campbell's brand of benevolent sexism is barely even remarkable, although I can picture his face and hear his tone of voice, based on my one million direct experiences of smug old men informing me that I am not human. Sub- or super-human almost doesn't matter. But that's not even a storytelling problem. Stories by and about idiots and assholes can still be good. It's just worth noting that the model storyline, according to Hollywood, is one that is defined as explicitly male by the guy who identified it in the first place.

The real problem is not with Campbell himself, or with Star Wars or the hero's journey or even sexism. It's about that goddamned narrative becoming so pervasive that people start thinking that things that do not follow it are inherently weird or even objectively incorrect. It's that people took Campbell's descriptive account of a common narrative and they made it prescriptive.

How many people thought Silence of the Lambs was a great film, but weren't particularly interested in the topic of serial killers? I'll raise my hand (I can see Mr. Pea saying "Nah, that one sucked too") and wager I wasn't the only one. Yet for fucking years afterward, we got like a couple serial killer movies per month. That's the trend that solidified my disgust for the Hollywood business model. I didn't want more serial killers; I wanted more films with intense performances and clever screenplays. Pick out what you actually liked about a successful film, and almost invariably, the studios pinpointed something completely different, for frustratingly stupid reasons.

Nooooooo! I liked Silence of the Lambs, and know exactly what you mean about that. There is an entire genre of TV shows that are just series of dumbed down Silences of the Lambs with an added emphasis on the hero cop who just cares too much trope to provide audiences with a polite fiction to distance themselves from the more direct approach of just showing a bunch of murders and stuff. (Imagine, though, a network television version of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Funny Games.)

I liked Silence of the Lambs. I'm tired of it NOW, though, for many of the same reasons I'm tired of the hero's journey. At this point, there's so little variation on the theme it's boring looking at different variations on the evil and twisted genius of murder. And so the original starts to suffer from looking trite by virtue of all the derivative work based on it.

[Sock Puppet]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I liked Silence of the Lambs. I'm tired of it NOW, though, for many of the same reasons I'm tired of the hero's journey. At this point, there's so little variation on the theme it's boring looking at different variations on the evil and twisted genius of murder. And so the original starts to suffer from looking trite by virtue of all the derivative work based on it.

Oh, me too. There are great films that I'll find myself watching if I happen upon them while channel-flipping, even if they're halfway over. Silence used to be one of those, but holy flaming Hopkinses, it's like the film/TV industry desperately wanted us all to be sick of it and did everything possible to make it happen. I just meant it as an example of the industry's abject contempt for the viewing public. The monkeys liked it! Throw them more serial killers!

But by and large, the viewing public did swallow that and countless other slop-the-bucket industry tactics, and will continue to do so. I have no idea how to even begin changing this co-dependent relationship.

[Janet]

This is a little off-topic, but your comment about the murdery TV shows reminded me. Last night I was watching and old episode of Grimm that I had missed and I suddenly realized something. One of the reasons that these supernatural procedurals are so popular now is that on a visceral level, we want to watch our heroes kill the bad guys. But we are finally accepting that the actual police violating rights and killing people happens to real people all the time and it makes us uncomfortable. So we need that layer of fantasy between us and the violence we crave.

[The Lone Ranger]

I've actually heard people claim that the "Hero's Journey" is the only narrative in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and that every sci-fi/fantasy story is some variation of that basic premise.

Which always makes me think that the person in question is woefully uninformed and/or totally lacking in imagination.



Oh, and for the record: Simon Pegg may have been in a couple of movies that featured a ship named Enterprise and characters named Kirk and Spock -- but I do not in any way, shape or form recognize them as "legitimate" Star Trek movies. At best, they were loud, flashy, mindless spectacles -- pale imitations of the real thing.