Posted on 03/25/2024 4:53:27 AM PDT by Enterprise
Too bad, so sad....
Learn to code.
Or maybe something actually productive.
Let them.
It’s their money to waste and if they go broke and out of business doing it, no skin off my back.
I can’t really speak for what is on TV. I don’t watch any regular TV myself anymore. I stream things on Roku. The commercials now are unbearable, foul, and crass.
Re: OP title......
Hollywood is making very bad movies..
Good current movies? I’ve not posted my freeper movie list of good recent movies in a while, so here it is. Try some of these:
The Way Back (2010); The Death of Stalin (2017); Arrival (2016); Brooklyn (2015); Mr. Jones (2019); Chernobyl (the miniseries, 2019); Leave No Trace (2018); Columbus (2017); Downfall (2004); Balloon (2018); The Professor and the Madman (2019); Lost in Translation (2003); Paterson (2016); Ashes in the Snow (2018); Dear Comrades! (2020); Within the Whirlwind (2009); The Dig (2021); Lore (2012); Conspiracy (2001); CODA (2021); On the Rocks (2020); Old Henry (2021); The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis (2021); Montana Story (2021); Drive My Car (2021); I’m Your Man (2021); After Yang (2021); Free Guy (2021); The Lost City (2022); Montana Story (2021); Petite Maman (2021); Another Round (2020); Compartment No., 6 (2021); Jockey (2021); Belfast (2021); See How They Run (2022); The Banshees of Inisherin (2022); Living (2022); TAR (2022); To Leslie (2022); Never Let Me Go (2010); Mr. Turner (2014); Nefarious (2023); Eternal Winter (2018); Sound of Freedom (2023); Oppenheimer (2023); The Florida Project (2017); Love at First Sight (2023); American Fiction (2023); Coherence (2013); Ladyballers (2013); The Holdovers (2023); Past Lives (2023); Primer (2004); Godzilla Minus One (2023); The Zone of Interest (2023); The Promised Land (2023)
Yes, Hollywood has problems. That’s nothing new, but the dominance of the streamers has created a new situation. It has led to unprecedented concentration as the streamers have bought up most of the legacy studios in order to get control of their film catalogues, and that has had several very destructive effects on the kinds of movies that are being produced. I won’t repeat that argument here.
An occasional good movie does get through the corporate maze of the big studios, but increasingly the good films are coming from the remaining small independent producers and from abroad. Even these will usually end up being picked up by one of the streamers for distribution, but at least they were independent at the front end. Since they are not the big franchise tentpoles, they usually don’t get much promotion.
In addition, the streaming system silos the audience so that something on Apple+ , Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. will be unavailable to a majority of the potential home viewing audience, at least initially. Some films remain siloed indefinitely but most get leased, travel the circuit, and will eventually work their way around to your platform of choice. But that will usually happen long after the moment they were getting some buzz, so it’s like finding a random book in the back stacks of a library. Ultimately most of them will be an inexpensive rental on multiple platforms, but unless you already know they’re there, you won’t find them. I’m willing to wager that most freepers have never heard of a majority of these films, and since they are intelligent, reasonably conservative films, that’s too bad.
So yes, good movies are still being made, but our target acquisition systems are broken. Until just a few years ago, I was in the nuke Hollywood from orbit camp. Then I had my Road to Damascus moment, tripped over a very good film that took me completely by surprise, and realized that I had a huge blindspot. Newly retired and with time on my hands, I became an active viewer and decided to go hunting for tolerably good “conservative” films, broadly defined. And since we all like assorted golden oldies and have our personal GOAT lists, I decided to focus on relatively recent films.
My list morphs each time I post it. My viewing tastes have changed as I’ve aged; I’m now more interested in great acting and serious character dramas, and I don’t give a fig about flying spandex or CGI heavy spectacles. YMMV. You won’t like all of these, but I don’t think you will be insulted or outraged by any of them. There are a couple of wildcards on the list, some of them suggestions from other freepers that I would not have found otherwise, given my own viewing habits. The oldest is Conspiracy (2001); most are within the last decade.
For those who take pride in not having seen any new movies since the last ice age, allow me to note that I’ve thrown these out for discussion on multiple movie threads in the past couple of years, and a fair number of freepers have mentioned some of them as well. Some freeper favorites that you should definitely check out before you say that no good movies are made today: The Death of Stalin (2017); Arrival (2016); Chernobyl (the 2019 miniseries); Conspiracy (2001); Old Henry (2021); Another Round (2020); and The Sound of Freedom (2023). There are a dozen others with smaller freeper viewership, but those of us who have seen them like them.
Coherence and Primer are outliers, but they caught my interest for another reason. Woke Hollywood — Disney being the worst of all — is blowing through hundreds of millions of dollars to produce flopbusters. I got interested in low cost indie films at the other end of the spectrum; it’s hard for the DEI commissars to complain about a writer-director team of one, and an indie film whose makers had to check under the couch cushions to find enough money to make it is too small for the grifters to target. At this end of the spectrum, the creatives are still in control of the project, not the corporate bureaucrats and the activist shakedown artists.
Anyhow, here’s my current freeper-friendly list. I will argue all day that these movies are, in most cases, “conservative” (broadly defined), or at least apolitical.
How many have you seen? Our viewing preferences differ so you won’t like them all, but which did you like? Other recommendations?
Agree entirely. There's so much drivel being made. Unimaginative. Uncreative. Uninteresting, and often woke and preachy. But there's so much of it. It's like trading beef Wellington for an almost unlimited supply of head cheese.
I mentioned that Coherence and Primer are outliers that caught my interest because of their low budget status. Both are science fiction flicks. Both rely on concept and script. Go into them cold; then consult Professor Wikipedia or read some reviews to figure out what you have just watched.
Great films, no. But Coherence was made for $30,000. Primer was made for $7,000, most of which was spent on film. One guy had an idea that he turned into a screenplay, and he rounded up his immediate family and a handful of friends to shoot it.
Creativity isn’t dead. You just won’t find it much at Disney, Apple, Amazon or the myriad legacy studios that they now own, because the corporate bureaucracies, the woke mafia, and the lowest common denominator logic of streaming have taken over.
That's embedded in the streaming model, and it's a big part of the problem. The streamers are in the subscription business, not the movie business, and they are global platforms that gravitate towards lowest common denominator generic content for generic global audiences. They also segment their viewing audiences into myriad subgroups, and their marketing strategy is to manage a content firehose that pumps something new to each group every week or every month. (And "new" doesn't actually mean a new film; it means new to this platform, even if it has been available in some other streamers' silos for three years.) Apart from a handful of tentpoles, very few of these films get much promotion, and often none. They just show up on the landing page as "newly added," linger there for a few days or a couple of weeks, and then disappear deep into the catalogue -- often before you've even noticed that they're there.
On top of that, the streamers' algorithms serve you up a steady diet of what you have been watching, so it all gets very repetitive very fast. No wonder people get bored and conclude that everything is stale, unimaginative and uninteresting.
Good films are still being made, but it's getting harder and harder for them to get noticed and break out.
***More good books have been written than I can read in my lifetime.***
As Siskel and Ebert said years ago, “The early movie makers were raised on Great Books and made movies of Great Books. Today’s movie makers were raised on comic books.”
That is a fine summation of Hollywood.
bkmk - great post!
I discovered Letterboxd a few years ago. The basic free version is a very easy place to log films that you’ve watched, review them if you want, check other viewer reviews, and keep a watchlist of movies that somehow came to your attention that you might want to watch later. It also has a “where to watch” function on the landing page for each movie that I’ve found highly reliable and very useful for tracking down hard to find movies.
Letterboxd was recently sold and I hope the new owners don’t get greedy and degrade the free basic version. The long list of movie suggestions that I posted is simply taken from my Letterboxd “diary.” I can sort and search movies in a variety of ways, but the “diary” is simply a chronological listing of my viewing, based on the date I first logged a movie. I could never create such a list from memory. Letterboxd makes it easy and intuitive.
I have no recommendations. I saw Death of Stalin and Downfall. I think I saw Arrival. I wanted to watch Chernobyl but it wasn’t available to me at the time.
Chernobyl was an HBO miniseries, which means it was siloed out of reach of non-subscribers. It is now available for free streaming on Max and Spectrum. You can buy it online at Amazon, Apple tv, Vudu and Microsoft. Ot you can buy the Blu-ray from Amazon. I’ve started buying physical media again for keepers, as the studios and streamers have started pulling content and engaging in undisclosed editing for the usual leftwing reasons.
It’s not free to you unless you are a Max or Spectrum subscriber, but Chernobyl is worth “buying a ticket.” I would go with the Blu-ray personally, but whatever. Streamer games: if you want to watch at home in 4k, you will have to subscribe to the Max expensive plan. It’s only available in SD on other platforms. Another reason to go with the Blu-ray.
P.S. The availability info on Chernobyl is from the Letterboxd “where to watch” tab. Great tool, and free.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.