Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films.
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
