With movies, I find it to be the opposite. I might recognize the old movies as better in many ways, but their pacing is excruciatingly slow compared to modern movies. It takes a layer of appreciation to get through many of them.
That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.
Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.
> filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films
Filmmakers have learned how to optimize for a very specific kind of "excitement", but I disagree that movies are more exciting now than they used to be.
The most exciting and engaging movies I can think of are all pretty old.
There's a fun little fact most don't know. The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades. Here are the data (US only): https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
Peak movies in terms of both tickets sold and total real revenue was 2002. Everything since then has been a rapid decline, paired with lots of inflation and ticket prices going up even faster than inflation. I'd also add that those data don't consider another aspect. Since 2002 the US population has increased by more than 45 million. Seeing ticket sales plummet alongside this is especially telling!
So, while you may personally find what passes for a movie now a days as "more engaging", even "the masses" would beg to differ!
> The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades.
Alternative read: the industry is dying so they double down on pandering in an ultimately futile attempt to bail out the sinking ship.
Consider anime: It has been a dying art ever since Japan's economic stagnation/recession in the early 90s. So the anime industry (generally, with some exceptions) turned hard into pandering to their most base fans, lonely dudes. Lots of waifu characters designed to sell body pillows and trash like that. This hasn't improved quality and sales continue to slump, but they're still trying.
Oddly, the rate of change seems to be a fairly consistent rate of change at around 3 frames per shot per year since 1930[1], with changes like MTV, the reduction of the role of the studio in the 60s and more creative freedom having not much change in the overall rate. Non-English films have also for some reason only had a 40% decrease in shot lengths over the same period. My hunch is that video literacy has increased as people are exposed to video with faster cuts than their parents, and we'll reach a bottom eventually. A rough comparison can be made to the word count of NYT best seller books steadily decreasing.[2]
They are more dumb tho,
scripts and dialogues are so much simple. They rarely give you the feeling of once a lifetime seeing experience. Most of them have too much CGI and sometimes not even looking rea at all.
Sorry, but you are just generalizing based on the top blockbuster movies. Films have never been more diverse in their style and quality and, in my opinion, offer something for everyone.
If you are looking for movies that focus on strong dialogue and character work those movies are still being made and are fantastic.
Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance.
My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.
Your post has it all in just two sentences: Maximum cynicism, "kids these days", "movies these days", randomly bringing up MTV, whinging about attention span, bringing up dopamine.
Really .. can you at least try to not be so cynical about the present? Everybody's walking around with a star trek device in their pocket that has all of the world's knowledge, can remote call anyone on earth, and can translate any language into any other.
Oh yes, and some movies suck. I bet if you look at the past few years of releases you'll find some you like, too.
you’re right, we are living in an era of incredible technology, and there are still plenty of good films nowadays, but you’re arguing with an imaginary figure you’ve invented. pretty much all they said was that attention spans are shorter nowadays - observably true - and that modern films cater to that - which the profit motive ensures
that isn’t “maximum cynicism” or “whinging” or even an attack on modern life
why are you jumping to such an argumentative posture? is this a debate you’ve had elsewhere that infuriated you?
There is definitely an element of conditioning here. People have grown accustomed to frenetic action and the studios like it because it’s easier than hiring good writers – especially since they’re hoping for global sales and humor, subtly, and nuance are hard to translate – but that’s a learned preference based on what dominates the market. If different things came back on the market people would get used to them, too.
Older movies are full of filler too, but it's generally less exciting filler - looooong shots of a car driving through the countryside or plot beats that could be 1 minute stretching to 10 without having any reason to be as long as they are. Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.
It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible.
Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.
I strongly disagree, I don't think movies have gotten better in any regard except for the cost of special effects (cheaper than ever before, and so, used more often and generally with less thought and care.)
I guess it would behoove this stance to put some sort of limit on the span here - are you saying that first movie of the horse running is equally effective as the latest A24 art-house horror flick, because I doubt it, so I'd like some bounds on these sort of statements that movies have not improved?
Also, keep in mind survivorship bias - we largely ONLY think of the great movies from the 50's and 60's but have plenty of bad examples of modern cinema to easily draw from.
I have gotten more enjoyment out of watching some silent-era movies than modern release movies. Particularly, the 1916 20,000 Leagues is great. In general I don't think there is any real relationship between the age of a movie and the quality of a movie; quality movies are more or less evenly distributed through time. Sometimes film makers strike gold through some fortunate coincidence of inspiration, talent and luck, and most of the time they don't. And yes, that means most old movies aren't good; but most new movies aren't good either.
The passage of time doesn't play a role, because even though individual directors/actors get more experience with age, they also age out of the industry and get replaced with new guys. And besides, it is very often the case that movies get worse as a director ages. Compare The Godfather to anything Francis Ford Coppola has made in the past 30 years. Or Michael Mann's Thief and Manhunter to anything he's done in the past 20. Or Ridley Scott's filmography. There are many examples like this; experience counts for something but old men often lose their edge.
This is strongly contradicted by how frigging long movies have gotten. Old action movies are often in the 90-120 minute range. New action movies - that are supposedly lacking that old filler - are often 3 hour slogs.
But here again we're looking at Marvel movies and saying that's the entirety of what's being offered in cinema's these days. It's not, but it feels like it.
In the mid 00s or so I would have said that movies were getting shorter. If anything, movies are getting longer again.
But there is no general relationship, direct or inverse, between the length of a movie and the quality of a movie. Some movies should be short and some movies should be long. It really depends on the movie in question.
A lot of great modern movies have pacing similar to those older ones you don't like. It's not that they "leveled up" into some new form and obsoleted what came before—the other sorts of pacing remain entirely valid and in heavy use.
I'm not saying no one uses long shots or takes anymore and they aren't totally ineffective - I just watched Mandy over the weekend and it has plenty and they are used effectively but it's also a move that seems to have people regarding it in extremes - it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make.
But what I'm trying to say is there are other tools in the toolbox now - I haven't heard anyone say that Everything Everywhere All At Once was bad, it's a great movie, absolutely full of deliberately chosen mood, and it never has to resort to extremely long shots that take the wind out of the story's sails.
Ah, OK—I may not have followed what you meant re: pacing in older movies, then.
I can think of a lot of older movies I'd not touch the pacing on. I don't think it'd improve the film. Then again, I admit I've bounced off a couple because of extremely-flat cinematography and slow-as-molasses pacing (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).
Maybe I'm misjudging what you mean by "old"—I'd kinda assumed you meant "before digital editing", say, 80s and earlier. I don't think films from the '70s tend to feel terribly different from modern ones (we've developed new and more-chaotic ways to assemble very bad action scenes, but that aside, not much different) for example, but would grant that it's probably possible to divide cinema into silent/middle/modern period as far as the feel or what's asked of the viewer, and that the former two do feel pretty different from modern films—but I'd say we were already transitioning out of "middle" and into "modern" in the '60s, so you've got to go pretty old to get into what I'd judge to be notably different.
Now, film films do tend to look very different from modern movies, even as recently as the 90s, but that's because easy digital color grading hadn't ruined the artform yet. :-)
> (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).
Some movies were just never very good in the first place, I'd put the original Oceans Eleven in that category. On the other hand, compare the original The Italian Job to the remake. The remake has faster 'modern' editing but it's definitely a much worse movie than the (excellent) original.
The opposite, really: they’re relying on non-stop action and familiar franchises to keep viewers from thinking about how thin the setting is or noticing the holes in the world building.
I feel like most of the arguments against modern cinema can be boiled down to "I don't like the new superhero movies". There's worlds of modern entertainment out there that's not created by Marvel or staring the Rock.
I'm not saying it's true 100% of the time, but I've noticed that older movies tend to have more fat and when they do it's more egregious.
Throughout this discussion I've realized that this whole conversation is fraught with survivorship bias - we imagine generic marvel movies or the fast and the furious stuff when we think of modern movies, but when we think of the past we really only consider the classics. We haven't yet seen what modern movies will qualify as classic.
The 80/20 rule holds here: 80% of everything is crap. That applies to movies now, and it also applies to movies in the past.
There's also the very real thing of changing tastes. Movies are made to appeal to the taste of audiences in the time they're made. Modern tastes are different than the tastes of yesteryear.
I think it's not right to say that modern tastes are better or worse than older ones. They're just different -- but it makes sense that the ones aimed at different tastes will be a less popular.
> especially since they’re hoping for global sales
On top of that, a lot of actually interesting content has the potential to cause shitstorms. Like, especially anything LGBT and women's rights won't fly in China, Russia, Arabia and lots of Asian countries. Black lead actors lead to massive shitstorms from the far-right in the USA and parts of Europe [1] - and so, producers leave all that "potentially troubling for sales" content out.
Everything "mainstream" is just the same bullshit now, white- and dumbwashed.
[1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
> [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example
Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.
I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley.
For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see <N-word>s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.
> but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media,
I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures.
Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.
For the targets of hate campaigns, even a few thousand nutjobs on the Internet is way more than enough to ruin their quality of life. People have been driven to suicide because of that.
The worst thing are the stalkers that don't leave it at comments on Twitter but cross into real world intimidation (e.g. invasive photos, ordering pizzas, ...) to outright violence - you never know when they are gonna hit.
Thanks for expanding that idea - completely agree, and this doesn’t need anyone at the studio to be a villain, it’s just standard corporate paperclip maximization at work.
Obligatory counterexample, comedies. A quickfire screwball classic like "His Girl Friday" has lots of smart lines per minute where recent Hollywood ones will have two jokes in 90mins that they've had to put into the trailer, and slow build ups so that everybody can get the lame joke.
