What was once a cineaste, film-loving community has been co-opted by corporations

Movies, music, and pop culture, in general, have sucked arse in the 21st Century.

And, at least as far as films go, catering to the crowd that eats up every single comic book film that's released on what seems like a weekly basis, is a big reason why. Throw in a lack of original ideas and prioritizing things like virtue signaling, political correctness, and cookie cutter "diversity" in casting and it's no wonder that quality films are pretty much non existent in the last 20 years.

Carson abandoned his role as board critic.

Is it already time for the weekly "shite on current movies, back in my day everything was amazing" thread?

I remember reading about how westerns were going to kill cinema because it was all Hollywood would make. Or monster movies, you know, the original shared universe no one ever talks about.

Let's be honest here, at no point was Hollywood some haven for high art. It is an industry that's goal is to make as much money as possible and to be propaganda for certain ideas/groups. That was true in the 50's and it's true now. A lot of this classic films were not well received at the time and picked up wider appeal later. Hell Citizen Kane did poorly Taxi Driver was the 17th highest grossing film of 1976, despite the fact that we would recognize it as one of the best films of that year. Fight Club flopped.

Film culture may have grown increasingly niche oriented in the internet age, but it’s not necessarily less fertile. Cinephilia is not a hegemonic position. For instance, you may consider Scorsese/Marvel an opposition, but from my standpoint it’s merely two facets of the mainstream American cinema. I once spoke to Jonathan Rosenbaum about this. He’s an American film critic who was based in Paris in the early 70s as the French correspondent for Sight & Sound. He said you might cover a film at a festival and go months before meeting someone you could discuss it with, but today you walk out of the latest Pedro Costa and there are a hundred people already discussing it online. He saw this as an undeniable improvement over a time and place so fetishized for its film culture that Bertolucci made a film depicting it (The Dreamers).

Cinephilia has always been fixated with its own demise. In the teens theorists claimed it would never graduate circus act. In the 30s sound was the end of ‘pure’ cinema. In the 40s it was television. In the 50s it was the collapse of the studio system. In the 80s, reactionary politics. Then came the digital cinema and the decline of theatrical distribution. Do you know what, in 1895, Louis Lumière, the inventor of the motion picture camera, said about his invention? “An invention without a future.”

As we speak, arguably the most prestigious film festival in the world is taking place (Cannes). Every day I can listen to several hours worth of podcasts’ coverage of the previous day’s screenings. I participate in a discussion about the festival on another forum that is many pages long with a fraction of the traffic of TigerDroppings. One is only limited by one’s curiosity. A lot of interesting films are made today. Much of the great cinema from the previous 100 years is available at your fingertips. What is important is how one orients themself to this proliferation; if you allow market forces to limit your horizons things will look grim indeed. Embrace the niche, stay curious.

In the 50s, the great French film theorist André Bazin responded to the hysterical polemics about CinemaScope that were taking place (the digital cinema hot takes of their day) by invoking the Lumière quote. He claimed that with each technical change the cinema was only moving toward its invention. The cinema is a nascent artform and its continual ‘death’ and rebirth is a symptom of its fecundity.

It was inevitable like OCP from Robo cop, only instead of going that vulgar and satire, you are force to watch things that are "good for you."