I don’t watch many (recent) movies anymore. They’re not as interesting to watch as they used to be in the 80’s-90’s. With some exceptions

Also they last for way too fucking long. I don’t have time to watch a 3 hour movie. Let alone a whole series that span over two decades (looking at you Marvel).

And I have even less time to watch TV series with one hour episodes that last for 8 fucking seasons or whatever. (Game of thrones)

And they really feel like they’re just trying to sucker us into watching these platitudes using our nostalgia as bait.

I dunno, man. I don’t think you can say “cinema was better in the fifites when there weren’t all these cheap action movies and creature features and cash-grab sequels” as though On the Waterfront didn’t come out within three weeks of a movie about giant radioactive ants and the fifth remake of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, sure, last year people were double-fisting a sprawling biopic about the man that flung the world irreversibly into the atomic age and a movie about singing plastic dolls, and finishing it off with a talking alien truck fighting a robot monkey… just like how eighty years ago Casablanca came out the same year as The Invisible Man’s Revenge and House of Frankenstein, sixty years ago people were just coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and turning right back around to go watch Charlton Heston punch a guy in a gorilla suit, forty years ago we got Amadeus hot on the heels of Police Academy and The Search for Spock, and nine years ago Spotlight and The Revenant were running trailers at the same time as Minions and Adam Sandler’s Pixels. This is not a new phenomenon, the past only looks better because nobody talks about the mediocre movies from that era anymore.

And even barring that, I really don’t think you get to say “TV is doing cinema better than cinema these days” as though for every Chernobyl or Succession there aren’t eight NCIS spinoffs, three Big Bang Theory prequels, a Celebrity Golden Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and - guess what, bucko - a show with a bunch of superheroes running around punching each other in the dicks, or whatever. The ratio of “high art” to “party time” is damn near identical, the movies just have a bigger ad budget.

So in the end, it seems all you’ve got left here is a guy starting a conversation about a new, topical thing and using that to segue into talking about a thing he made last year and how it’s so much better than new popular thing, and you should watch that instead. Thanks, Brian, super glad we had this talk.

~I guess I’m gonna feel real silly if I ever get around to watching Deadpool & Wolverine and end up agreeing with this guy.~

When going to the movies requires planning the entire day around arbitrary showtimes and inflated runtimes, showing up early on case of lines, spending a small fortune on tickets and an even larger one on snacks, dealing with power tripping teens who threaten to call the cops to kill you…, being forced to watch 20 minutes of commercials before the trailers even start so that by the time the movie begins any popcorn left is cold and mysteriously starting to smell like vomit, then running to the restroom to find half the lights and toilets don’t even work, the movie better be guaranteed to be worth the effort and make full use of the “cinema experience”.

For me, that means big names in established franchises with lots of action and explosions as pretty much anything else would be better watched at home.

Old man yells at cloud.

I agree that there is a lot of slop out there, but there always has been. There are still plenty of classics being produced.

A lot of this seems to be incoherent grumbling.

It’s down to the technological improvements in TVs and increase in the expense of going to the movies (relatively speaking).

There used to be a very wide separation of resolution between SD CRT TVs and seeing a film in a cinema. Now you can have a fairly large 4K TV and have something very close to a cinema experience at home.

And on the the other end, with technologies like digital cameras, “The Volume” and CGI in general, it’s becoming less expensive to put movie quality production values within reach for TV shows. If you can re-use the same CGI models used previously the costs go down. Sure it costs money to make a CGI Star Destroyer or a robot, or a city backdrop or whatever, but once it’s done it can be re-used over and over again.

This all adds up to people only going to theaters for event type movies where people will dress up in costumes and have a party like atmosphere. As engaging as it may be to see a story about some rich people squabble over getting a lot of inheritance, it’s not something that you need to go to a cinema to experience.

Ah nothing like effete dilettante artists telling us bumpkins that what we like to watch isn’t really art and we should go lock ourselves in a dark room to watch a black and white film that’s mostly exposition about morality given over long zooms on broken furniture or swooning women or an old man smoking a pipe.

Sorry dude but the high tech equipment we have in theaters should mostly be used to blast our eyeballs and ears into oblivion. I’ll watch deep, moving art pieces on my home television.

I totally get what he is saying. Although D&P might not be the best example because it has what a lot of movies nowdays are missing.

Love.

The actors love the characters and each other.

It wasnt just another day in The ‘office’. And that reads on screen.

A lot of movies are just soulless right now. If not built by AI then they they are built by committee.