re: The Critical Drinker: Why Modern Movies Suck

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A24 has made some good original content since their inception, but very little of it has entered into the public's collective conscious quite like movies such as Pulp Fiction did.

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I know you'll think this is an excuse, but the 90s were the final decade of any kind of monoculture. Pulp Fiction screened in every city and was advertized on every channel, back when there were a great deal fewer channels. Th ratings of the lowest-rated, immediately canceled TV shows, would put to shame the highest rated shows of today. Unless you worked at a local record store, you know what radio and video channels played for you.

You can't instantly pierce and dilute the culture now, but to say Ex Machina, Lady Bird, The Witch, or The Lobster haven't entered the collective conscious of anyone with a television under 40 is crazy talk. Hell, I know people who never watch movies who have seen Midsommar because it so quickly became notorious.

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Hell, Hitchcock made The Man Who Knew Too Much twice. Once in 1934 and then again in 1956.

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And both films feature a significantly different plot. The only thing they really had in common was the title of the movie and the kidnapping of a kid which sets off the story.

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I really don't think the people complaining about sequels and remakes realize just how common doing that has been throughout movie history.

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The difference between now and then is that sequels and remakes tend to be the only films nowadays to get an ultra-wide release (4,000+ theaters). If we want to see something new and original like Whiplash we tend to have to find an arthouse theater or wait for it to be released on digital streaming or Blu ray.

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Even the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz is a remake.

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Which is so different from the original it isn't even funny. The 1925 original was a silent film and featured a completely different antagonist (Prime Minster Kruel vs. the Wicked Witch of the West) and a substantially different plot.

People don't have a problem with remakes if they are done well and put a new and improved spin on the original. It's why remakes like Ocean's Eleven work and remakes like the Disney live action adaptations do not.

The good movies are still out there.

They just aren't mainstream.

Crap is mainstream. CGI expensive Drive-Thrus. Late-Night nonsense with bigger budgets.

Lawrence of Arabia wouldn't be the biggest movie in the world today. It would be niche. Maybe considered artsy.

There's still a lot of good films being made today. It's just that franchises like Fast & Furious and comic book films get all the attention, so people like to yell "everything sucks now." Seek out other types of films and you'll see that there's still a lot of quality out there.

I will say that a major problem is, due to political correctness, we're no longer getting great comedies. That's really bad.

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every time people post his reviews, its typically him shitting on something.

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Well yeah, that's his shtick. He does usually have a lot of good points mixed in there with the smack talk though. He makes fun of himself (or at the the character he portrays) in most videos too.

I find most them to be pretty entertaining. Stop taking it so seriously.

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Lawrence of Arabia wouldn't even get made today. It would be considered too expensive and its subject matter so niche that no one in Hollywood would take a chance on producing it.

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The reality is that the entertainment industry; from tv, to movies, to music, to video games, etc; has become increasingly risk averse as it has become increasingly consolidated over the last 25 years. There have been several changes in culture, technology, and consumer habits which have motivated these changes from the rise of Napster and online piracy, to the mid-2000's writers strike, to the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of cancel culture in the early 2010's, the streaming revolution, the media's reaction to Trumpism, Covid, and finally the financial incentives to cater to overseas audiences (The Chinese Communist Party).

As a result, you have a smaller number of major studios, distributors, and distribution channels than ever before putting all of their resources into fewer projects than ever before, and making sure that those few projects have the highest floor possible. That means established franchises with built-in fanbases.

They're just not willing to invest in breaking any new ground or trying anything out there. As a result, innovative directors have figured out that the way to make the kinds of daring experimental movies they want to make is to incorporate their ideas into tent-pole franchises (The Joker, Thor: Ragnarok, Deadpool, The Last Jedi, Justice League, etc). That's the only way that they can have any kind of innovation or creativity, and even that will ultimately be stifled by Chinese censors and corporate interlopers with focus-groups.

The end-result is a penny-wise, pound-foolish entertainment industry which is growing stagnant and seeing shrinking margins year after year.