Ask Lemmy

I don’t really care about Star Wars

That seems like a perfectly valid reaction to most of the movies beyond the first 2-3. I know there are some exceptions, including some of the animated series, but most of it is just repetitive, useless dreck IMO.

If you want millennials to go to the theater you need to figure out what we can do with our kids for 2 damn hours.

The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

Advertising matters for movies. Every time someone says "movies suck now", there's always some guy that says "movies are great if you know where to look". Sure, but where is that? I can find listicles with a few of them, but this is usually only the ones that break into mainstream, a year later. Even generic reddit and Lemmy/Piefed subs aren't much better. It's not feasible to ask someone to join a forum or Discord about indie movies just to not be fed slop.

I liked The Happening.

Whether it was intentional or not, there's a really interesting metaphor for the 24/7 news cycle, the need to blame something, and the state of the world. There's so much in there to think about but most of the audience just thought "plants make people kill themselves? That's too silly". In my mind it isn't the plants; no one knows, but the need to get the first headline, or feel in control is so great that people get frantic, panicky, and dangerous.

That is a hot take.

modern movies suck today because Hollywood stopped telling stories and started selling fantasies.

take for example two movies that are somewhat similar, Falling Down (1993) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009).

In FD the audience spends 75% of the movie following a guy around who is clearly not well. he's the antihero that we all sometimes wish we could be, but we also acknowledge it's moralistically unjust to just go around blowing shit up and shooting at people. towards the end of the movie you understand the real cause of why he was acting the way he was which made his character even more relatable. it made you question our society and the cruel realities that everyday people survive. it makes you think that maybe that "pocket protecting pencil pusher" has more in common with you than you'd like to admit.

In LAC the audience is immediately jarred by a violent sexual event that charges you with a desire for revenge. The rest of the movie is about a guy taking that revenge and getting some sadistic pleasure from it. you aren't supposed to relate to the main character, or any character in the entire movie. everyone is shitty except for his dead wife and kid. The premise of the entire movie is to make the audience feel good that "justice" is being administered and sugar coats it in a high fructose action syrup. by the end of the movie you're filled with rage of the injustices within our own world and feel as if you have been wronged like the main character. you spend the rest of the night imagining your own revenge if you were the main character.

FD tells the story of how far a broken man will go if he has everything taken from him.

LAC sells the fantasy that revenge is action packed and you will always win if your cause is righteous and just.

that said, don't get me wrong. I liked both movies, but I'm not going to lie to myself and say that LAC isn't just revenge porn.

modern movies are flat and simple because audiences lack the mental capacity they used to have. this is because we no longer watch them for entertainment, we watch to escape our own realities.

edit: oh yeah and sound engineers can suck fucking dick if they can't understand how to level out the foreground, background, and vocals for a regular not action movie. I'm tired of reading subtitles.

I really liked how the 48fps version of the Hobbit looked (even though the movies themselves were mediocre).

I'm just happy with myself for sitting through a whole movie. I have no idea if it was good or bad. It's always good I sat through a movie.

Cinema has it's own symbolic language. As does music, dance, painting, etc. They are all different languages with different capabilities. Translation from book to movie is always incomplete, just as The Divine Comedy does not move into English without significant compromise. Adaptation is the best to hope for. And even that is often too difficult to accomplish well.