In spite of the article's somewhat backhanded reference to such, I'd also mention Total Recall in a a positive light (and an example of something that Hollywood doesn't do anymore). The most unique thing about that movie is that it's effectively two different movies. I saw that movie when I was young and found it satisfying because of how it was advertised: action, Schwarznegger, explosions, and 3 titted Martians. Watching it 3 decades later, I only then realized what an amazing movie it really is.
The story is insightful, heavy on philosophy, extremely ambiguous, and digs into interesting questions about a very viable future technology. On a superficial level one can take the ending (which does provide closure) at face value, but it was intended to make one think. It's based on a Philip K Dick short story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", and it shows.
It's a grandiose story, but only on the surface and only due to the fact it's set in the future. The plot is something that will affect everybody at some point. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd strongly recommend going in blind.
Total Recall has it all: The rather bloody action and shooting, the gimmicks (digital nail polish! Live X-ray scanners!), abstruse ideas and images (Kuato lives!), Arnie delivering zingers with an Austrian accent. And then, once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie, and watch it a couple of times with that additional perspective. There are very few films which deliver similar amounts of cinematic joy, unfortunately. The last two that I watched were Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, and surprisingly a Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow. Both highly recommended if you like Total Recall.
As a Cruise film, it may fall off many people's radars, but it's got some really well worked out trippy stuff in there.
But I'm a sucker for non-completely-dumb time travel stuff. If you are too, be sure to check out Tenet and Predestination, if you haven't watched them already.
Both are well done, evoke consistent atmospheres, and didn't get the attention they deserve. Predestination is more physical in a Cronenbergian sense, while Tenet is pure Nolan administered intravenously.
I generally like Tom Cruise movies, they're good more often than not. Edge Of Tomorrow was one of his best.
I've even shown it to my 9 years old kid, he was flabbergasted. Might have not understood everything (he doesn't have the context) but overall he said it was the best movie he ever saw (so far).
Edge of Tomorrow was such a sleeper hit for me, I watched it on a plane while browsing for something mindless, and I was riveted. I must have watched it another five times since.
Tip: Don't read anything about it, just watch it.
I similarly loved Children of Men, they really nail the dystopian aesthetic.
> once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie
PKD didn't write "mind games"; according to one's own view of reality, he was either among the most sincere intellectuals since Kant, or a deeply paranoid, mentally ill individual - and everything inbetween. He was truly invested in the questions about perception that he poured over all his work.
You're right, they aren't mind games, I wasn't particularly happy about that formulation myself. Better would be maybe psychological conundrums? Or thought experiments on consciousness and the mind?
I love PKD but having read most of the biographical material about him and a large chunk of his exegesis ( a journal that he kept after experiencing a break with reality late in his life) I'd put my money on deeply patanoid, mentally ill individual.
But god bless him, he certainly did leave us with some marvelous tales designed to make us question the world around us and ourselves.
Then there's Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven masterpiece of layered meaning and interpretation. On the surface it's a jingoistic pro-military recruitment poster as movie, full of shallow facile characters. But oh boy, if you read between the lines there's no bottom to how deep that movie goes.
Also both movies have Michael Ironside, which is always a plus.
I watched it as a child and I wanted to kill bugs too. Then I watched it again as an adult and realized “holy shit, I would have been a fascist. Like all people, I too have that capacity.”
It was a seriously enlightening moment. A satire subtle enough that I could see both sides of it at different periods of my life.
I loved Ender's Game[0] for the tight story line coupled with well place special effects and the crucial moment of empathy Ender Wiggin shows for the Formics. Its a pity that chances of a sequel are pretty low.
There is a book by Norman Spinrad called « The iron dream » which can make everyone realizes how easy it can be to not spot extremist and fascist views. For those who don’t know it, it is basically a book within a book, as if in a parallel universe, Hitler had emigrated to the US and become a fantasy writer instead of what happened in our timeline. But of course, his ideas still are present in his novel you read and you read that from the perspective of the hero of the book as he slaughters and « defends » himself and the civilisation from what he feels are attacks from inferior species.
The kind of books that forces you to question yourself and how you receive entertainement, News, and how you filter and analyze that, or not, before being influenced by it.
Since the reviewer mentioned it, the fact the characters all come from Buenos Aires is one of my favourite things about the movie. I've mentioned this a few times in conversation with people about the move, and they flat out didn't believe me. Their brains just didn't parse it, or what the implications are at all, because it's just there. It's never called out, or explained, or made a point.
There are two sequels and the first is really bad. None of the implied critique, just a straight cheesy SF action C-grade. The third film is actually worth a watch IMHO. It's still nowhere near the level of the original, but it's fun to see Van Dien kicking ass and taking names.
It's completely indistinguishable from a generic Californian city. The language, culture, it's all utterly homogenous and generic. Not even a trace of anything that made Latin America distinctive is left. That's just how the world is, everything that makes a place or culture unique has been paved over
How did that happen? Why? No explanation, no hidden references, no hand-holding to any possible conclusion, no reference to the cost of a social change so complete. Unless you actively engage and critically think through what you are seeing and it's implications, you would never know.
In the hands of any other director it could just be laziness. Oh look, he's set it in Argentina, but they're all just like American kids. He couldn't even be bothered to include any local references. He could have at least hired local talent right? Taken advantage of the setting? But no, the fact the setting is this way is the actual point.
I think you're reading too much into it. They're from Buenos Aires because in the novel Rico is a Latino guy from Buenos Aires and the movie wanted all the characters to have gone to school together, therefore they're all from Buenos Aires. Verhoeven is not a Heinlein fan and says he didn't even read the book before making the movie.
This is the kind of thing I think of 80% of movie rabbit holes people get into… Often the explanations are plain and unglamorous. But of course everyone is free to interpret what they want from the end result - just maybe not adscribe it to the creator’s original intent.
It's not totally clear to me what their purpose was. Did they just use Buenos Aires because that's where the book was set, without any deeper motivation?
On that specific point no they don't go in depth, but then it's a short interview. He does say it's a comment on contemporary American culture, as with the rest of the movie you interpret it your own way. Clearly though from the interview he makes it clear the intent was political satire, and a deliberate critique of fascism and kind of world and people it might produce. That's the lens to look at these things through. But there is no one way to read it all, that's why I find it so re-watchable.
If you want to read it that all the other cultures were wiped out in the war and only one culture survived, sure.
If you think the one world government imposed a monoculture, maybe.
If you think humans are herd creatures that naturally converge on group-think consensus and globalisation is just going to go that way, fine.
Or maybe it was lazy film making cutting corners for budget and convenience reasons. OK. But in rebuttal to that possibility I submit in evidence the entire back catalogue of Paul Verhoeven movies.
That's one possibility, another I've considered is it's just a linear extrapolation of the trend towards global homogenisation, extended arbitrarily into the future. So either it's a critique of their political system (very likely) or it's a pessimistic take on our innate laziness and tendency to conformity. Or both. Overall it another marker for how unutterably shallow and awful all these people and their society are.
Then you'd read Verhoeven's intent correctly. Heinlein was an unabashed fascist and nationalist, and Verhoeven gave him his future fantasy exactly as he intended it (military glorification, unification, responsibility to the state as the highest virtue), and white-washing away any implications of that life.
Sometime over the past several years we seem to have discarded any specific definition of the word "fascist". All we're left with is just "somebody whose politics I disagree with".
I don't believe Heinlein was a fascist at all, but he's hard to pigeon hole. He was a radical libertarian, yet believed that a benign military world government was possible and even desirable. Well, a military world government sounds petty close to fascism, but he somehow thought that this would be the best way to guarantee individual liberties.
So his goals were libertarian, but I can't help thinking his intended means to achieve them would wind up, er, not doing so at all even slightly.
I think the backlash to describing Heinlein as "fascist" says more about the average person's understanding of real-life fascism than anything. I get the impression most people just replace the word with "evil" in their head rather than considering it on its merits and understanding what his thoughts on it were. There's often an implicit unstated argument there, like "X author is fascist, fascism is evil, therefore X author is evil, therefore you should not read their books", which seems a little more extreme than is warranted.
On that note, Heinlein wrote all sorts of weird, contrarian themes into his books. Many of them pushed against the prevailing social norms and beliefs of the time, from sexual norms to ethics to race relations. Trying to pin down his actual beliefs is difficult because he would often write one book taking one stance on an issue, and another later with a totally contrary stance. Often when I read Heinlein I find myself strongly disagreeing with what he's putting down, but fascinated with the question or angle being posed/presented.
You and I (as an uncle reply) overlapped in flight. I agree with what you're saying, but I think that even before getting to that, the word "fascism" has lost any precise definition. As far as I can tell, it can no longer be interpreted to mean anything more specific than "politics that I disagree with".
And then, of course, your comment about people being unwilling to even consider the thoughts of those they disagree with steps in.
That’s a pretty dismissive critique of Heinlein. He was a complex individual who went through an evolution of sorts during an interesting period of history. We’re not talking some circa 2020 Facebook political figure.
There are alot of people who made the transition from a socialist to a more right wing position. It’s important context that many of the thinkers of that day didn’t have the benefit of seeing the future… the prospect of nuclear conflict was very real and had an outsized impact on people who were aware of what was actually going on.
His isn’t necessarily a worldview I subscribe to, but isn’t worthy of being dismissive about.
Starship troopers gets a lot of flack -- "Based on the back cover of the book by Robert A. Heinlein" was a popular critique, "90210 in outer space" was another, and Doogie Howser (as NPH was them known) wasn't a great casting choice IMO -- but the special effects are flawless and Peter Venhousen really nails underlying themes of the book and the anti-bug propaganda. I don't know anyone who saw the film and didn't want to go fight the bugs - thank goodness he wasn't remaking Triumph of the Will.
> I don't know anyone who saw the film and didn't want to go fight the bugs
About as likely as someone watching Hanger Games and not getting lost on the reality show history, instead of being annoyed that the movie's history didn't progress.
Goes to prove that propaganda works. At least for short periods.
I can believe that. I think it helps to understand where Verhoeven is coming from. He grew up in Holland during the German occupation, and it's liberation by the allies in the 1940s. He's seen the Nazi propaganda, the show and heroic aura of fascism right up close. He lived inside it. He also saw the bodies from summary executions of civilians lying by the side of the road. They're two very different sides of the same coin of fascism, one shiny and seductive, the other a twisted mirror image of ugliness.
A lot of his movies show you the heroic, seductive face of fascism for most of the movie, but every now and then through the movie he twists the coin just a little bit. You get a glimpse of what's on the other side, hinting at how what you think you're seeing isn't at all the whole story. But he leaves you to figure that out, the same way he did.
He could have picked a different franchise (or created a new one) instead of hitching the movie's title to a book with a totally different message and atmosphere.
I wanted to see something darker, something about a kid growing up into an officer. I wanted to see Jonnie realize how much trouble he was in and feel lucky for only getting a few lashes, and I wanted to see Zim give him a microscopic bit of comfort just before that sentence. I wanted to see a father and son reunite for 45 minutes at the starport, and the proud father bounce off to his new ship. I wanted an exploration of morality in military service as a mirror for how we guide our own lives in the real world. I wanted to see the stupid powered suits, okay?
Instead I got a terrible political commentary with bad acting. He could have done that with his own story (wait, he did).
I don't know why the film was called Starship Troopers. Oh wait, I do; it was a money grab. Verhoeven didn't even finish reading the book.
Yep that's fair, a faithful adaptation would have turned out very different. However this is the script the studio green-lit, and Verhoeven worked very closely with the writer to realise his (the writer's) vision. I love it, I think it has merit in it's own right, but sure it's not at all what an actual Heinlein fan would want or expect. It's really more of a satirical commentary on the book.
Movie theory (not mine): the bad acting is intentional on the director's part. He may have intentionally cast pretty faces with little talent as a shoutout to fascist films who did similar.
Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are a few of my top sci-fi movies of all time. Both have themes that echo the Matrix, but done in a much more subtle and thought provoking way IMHO.
It's a shame The Thirteenth Floor came out the same year as the Matrix...
Yes yes!! these are two of my favourite all time movies. Kiefer Sutherland acting in Dark City is amazing. Those are two movies I can re-watch several times without getting tired of them.
>I'd also mention Total Recall in a a positive light (and an example of something that Hollywood doesn't do anymore). The most unique thing about that movie is that it's effectively two different movies. I saw that movie when I was young and found it satisfying
I now honestly think that great entertainment is an action-lead plot that's executed by an auteur with a deep vision, helped by a crew of true professionals. I was reminded of how great and multilayered Conan the Barbarian (also with Arnold), and how perfect the soundtrack, sets and underlying themes work in the movie.
They never attempt anything begging for awards, nor the signaling that many modern filmmakers do just to impress, they just put in the things that seemed to work best.
I can't see it how you saw it. Me + brother watched it and thought it was 'disappointing' (me) and 'idiotic' (him). But to each their own.
The 'heavy on philosophy' - what do you refer to. The trope about what is reality has history (recently 'inception', going back to the early 70's with 'Night of Delusions' by Keith Laumer and I'm sure it goes back a long way more) and rarely gets answered properly, so nothing much philosophical there. We thought it was just a bad film.
You can piece together the entire movie by watching clips on YouTube. I try out a lot of movies this way, but Total Recall is the one I loved the most. It's a whole different world.
Asian cinema still produces movies with deep philosophical twists like that. Check out some YouTube recaps for any movie that seems out-there and you'll find out that more often than not it was made in Asia.
It had a very definitive ending, and felt shallow.
The original movie and the short story are some of my favorites.
I later read an article or something about the original movie about how when Quaid begins to break the scenes use red lighting. And when the doctor comes into the room and warns that if Quaid kills him that the walls would crumble, etc. All of it happens.
The entire plot is designed by Quaid in the beginning, down to his love interest.
So the end begged the question of whether he really uncovered memories, or if he had an adverse reaction and when the doctor tried to help Quaid shot him and delved into his psychosis.
Apparently the remake had a director's cut that tried to make the ending more ambiguous, but I've never seen that version- once was enough.
Unfortunately most movies these days are more about "the message" than a coherent story.
But GOOD NEWS!
This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched "Hustle". Adam Sandler's latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I'm not really into basketball.
But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.
The thing missing from many movies these days with "the message" is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.
And that's the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It's a shame really. It's all about politics these days and making sure there is some race/gender/cultural representation (I'm saying this as a black guy).
Someone's been watching The Critical Drinker - but I totally agree with him as well :)
The lack of obstacles to overcome and the general saint-like presence of protagonists these days is miserable. It's the same thing you see in political discourse these days; if you're not COMPLETELY with us on every issue, you are a fascist devil. Can't have that in your movies so you end up with perfect moral beings with no flaws.
That's why the new Top Gun is such a monster at the box office. It's a "woke zero" movie in which you believe the characters are actually competent because you watch them train. They're believable and you want them to succeed. It's just a fantastic action movie and is even better than the original. A great reminder of what Hollywood can do when it's firing on all cylinders and isn't distracted by trying to do ideological brainwashing.
I think you're right. A lot of times in modern movies, the plot, setting, and characters exist solely to advance the ideology it is trying to push. Because ideology is a ideal of real life that almost by definition is incomplete, the plot/setting/characters feel inconsistent, and the illusion of internal logic is broken. For example, a character might do or say something that is inconsistent with reality purely in order to push a certain message, and it's really obvious what's happening. It's like if you're watching an action flick and the actor suddenly turns to the camera, smiles, and says "and that's why kids shouldn't do drugs". It pulls you out of the story -- even if you agree with the ideology.
Oh what I would give to be able to experience a world where the movie flopped. The same people claiming it was successful because it didn't try to be woke would have said it failed for being too woke (female pilots, multi-ethnic crew, unnamed enemy, etc).
That's a curious inversion of cause/effect. You're suggesting people have latched onto this movie specifically and are trying to "claim" it as non woke even though it's not? There are plenty of movies that do well at the box office yet get panned for being super woke, why this one specifically?
No no, that's all wrong. A typical Hollywood woke Top Gun Maverick would have looked very different. The movie would be oriented around a female hero who is constantly being harassed or undermined by jealous men, who then get told they're dinosaurs and a relic of a previous non-woke era. At some point a frustrated white man would attack one of the women who would inexplicably turn out to be a black belt in karate (never previously mentioned), and the much larger and stronger man would thus end up on his back within three seconds. The commanders would all have been black (instead of just one in a relatively minor supporting role), and Maverick himself would either have been Chief Dinosaur, relegated to a loser's watching position at the end for his white male crimes, or - just as likely these days - replaced by a black actor without comment.
Top Gun Maverick is being more or less universally described as a non woke film. The fact that it has women and black people in it doesn't change that, because - and this is really important - anti-woke people are not racist nor sexist. That's the core reason for the whole culture war! The racism and sexism comes from woke people who are really open that they hate "white men", yet who claim it's everyone else animated by racial/gender hatred. That's why you're struggling to understand why a film can be hailed as non-woke yet still feature a mixed cast.
Maverick is non-woke for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, the cast is realistic. The US military is primarily made up of American men, and most American men are white with a large minority of Latino and African-Americans. Maverick depicts this reality accurately, or at least, accurately enough for film goers to accept it as such. Most of the pilots and Navy staff are white men, with a minority who aren't. They are usually married and if they aren't, they'd quite like to be married. Likewise, although women are now allowed in historically that wasn't the case and so it seems realistic that there's only one. None of them are inexplicably better than the others for identity reasons.
Secondly, the script lacks ideology. The characters don't make speeches about how the world should be. They don't try to remake the own world in a 'better' image, mutiny for moral reasons or any other of the stock clichés of woke storytelling. The characters are just professionals who focus on training, and ultimately just soldiers, so they complete the assigned mission without asking too many questions.
This lack of ideology is not merely replacing woke ideology with another. It is a genuine lack. Although the military in question is without a doubt the American military, there is almost no USA! USA! rah-rah. Baseball talk is kept to an absolute minimum. It's not a woke leftist film, but it's also not a Republican dream movie either. The pilots just ... train and fight. It's thus very interesting that you picked the unnamed enemy as a woke script aspect because it didn't seem that way to me at all. Woke people are never shy about naming the groups they hate! It's a slightly jarring stylistic choice, at least at first, but I don't think the script could have worked any other way. For the story to make sense you have to believe they're (a) not in the middle of WW3 (b) they're fighting an enemy that doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't start WW3 if their airspace is violated and yet also (c) has more advanced fighter jet tech than the USA. There are no countries that match this set of criteria. The best match for the unnamed enemy is IMHO clearly Iran: the extreme tactics used to prevent uranium enrichment, the mountainous terrain etc. But it's unbelievable that they'd have military tech than the USA. Someone else I talked to who saw the movie thought it was clearly meant to be China. The enemy ends up being a blank slate because filling it with details would have reduced the movie's focus on the action and created irreconcilable plot holes, not because woke people are so caring and reluctant to pick a fight!
Dr Who is a good example. There has always been a message in the shows but the story took precedence. Now the message takes precedence and the story and show suffers. It's unwatchable even with the audio muted!
Terry Pratchett's work is a good example of progressive ideas told so well that the story is all that anyone cares about.
I'm actually a bit sad about Doctor Who, I've not watched it since the Capaldi era which really wound me up because he's a fantastic actor who was dealt a crap hand with crappy scripts that have crawled entirely up their own arse.
I made it through Capaldi and a season of Whitiker before quitting. How can a show keep hiring such talented actors and wasting them with such consistently garbage material? No wonder they're talking about rebooting the whole thing.
>>No wonder they're talking about rebooting the whole thing.
I am pretty sure to most fans the current era is the "reboot", and they would prefer them to go back to just before Capaldi era, start from their and pretend Capaldi/Whitiker era shows where another universe.
To me, the show's nature completely changed when Stephen Moffat took over. I really enjoyed the Ponds' story arc, but it felt like Moffat had just thrown out all of the other characters and stories that I'd grown to love before the 11th Doctor showed up. The monster-of-the-week show with the occasional through-line had become (for better or worse) a show about a multi-episode, multi-season plot. It was almost a new, different show with the same basic premise.
And then Clara came along. It's kind of like how Capaldi and Whittaker went; Jenna Coleman seems like a pretty good actress given a vacuous role. Even the character started out as an interesting twist with lots of potential for good story telling, but it seemed like Moffat couldn't quite figure out what he wanted to do with her but couldn't let her go, either. I don't remember exactly how long she was the primary companion, but it felt like an eternity (and I guess in canon, it sort of was).
Moffat wrote some of the best episodes of the Davies era. It felt like when he was put in charge of whole seasons, he applied his same writing technique to the larger scale of whole seasons. Which resulted in each individual episode being too sparse.
>Terry Pratchett's work is a good example of progressive ideas
For their day, sure. If told today, the humanising of, and sympathy with, police would get him removed from "polite" circles as surely as the creator of a wizarding franchise.
This comment reminds me a lot of The Critical Drinker on YouTube. Sometimes a bit biting, but often accurate in analyzing what went wrong in some movie's plot. One of the most egregious and frequent is having characters who basically have zero or backsliding character arcs.
He likes to do alt right click bait and I mainly ignore him these days.. like I would tag him as a leftie and I mainly agree with him in terms of how obnoxious and cynical corpo-hollywood is in its execution of inclusion and diversity (to be clear: I want more diversity in entertainment) but he does play it up quite a bit and exaggerates “the message” thing he pushes. Months ago, I watched a ten minute video/rant on Loki where he complained about forced inclusion and gender politics ruining the show.. though I finally saw the show this week and I found it to be very good and no where near as annoying as he made it out to be.
He’s part of an alt right baiting group of youtubers like Nerdroitic who all flirt with this notion of white culture being under siege. Like I don’t believe any of these guys swing that way (as in MAGA) but they like the views on their channels.
For some time YT was convinced that guy was the main thing I needed to watch (other than cooking), so I have seen a fair amount. He's generally right about plots. I wanted to think some of the more obnoxious stuff was mostly a joke, but eventually I decided he's serious about it. He may not actually be a racist, but he has convinced me he is actually a sexist. Given that, his judgment seems a bit less accurate than I thought initially.
Others may disagree. The last straw for me was his review of "Captain Marvel". Granted, that is not a great movie. I watched it after seeing one or more of his five reviews of the film (at this point I'm not sure which it was?), however, and his complaints didn't really seem to apply. Or maybe they applied, but not really in the emphatically gendered way he seems to think? Annoying male characters are just annoying, but somehow annoying female characters are the downfall of society? Really? You do realize that typically the same writer is writing characters of both sexes?
Yeah I find myself agreeing with him when it comes down to studio meddling or missed opportunities but his commentary on anything related to feminism or gender related issues/casting is a mixed bag.
Like his whole thing about “the message” misses the forest for the trees. Yeah, Hollywood, in particular the gatekeepers controlling content for Science Fiction and Fantasy, are obnoxious and breaking many beloved franchises but the real problem is that mainstream entertainment could never become the hero we need to advance culture because the industry is inherently corrupt and greedy anyways and, in the main, disinterested in high art and culture. How could the engineers of disposable, crowdpleasing entertainment ever with a straight face pretend to be educators and philosophers? Anyone who finds hollywood lacking should consider moving on to art house cinema and literature. The endless whining peppered with unaware sexism is pretty lame. If the critical drinker really cared he’d use whatever cultural cache he has to steer his audience towards good things.
He just posts what gets him views. Most of his criticism is way blown out of proportion. I think you're looking too much in it. When someone has an opinion, it doesn't mean he is left or alt right..
It seems like these creators and others like Tim pool, have found a sizeable niche audience that really supports them (in part they are alienated by the mainstream and the alt right welcomes them).
It’s weird how hippies have become conservatives if they didn’t go woke.
>>It’s weird how hippies have become conservatives if they didn’t go woke.
Except they dont... Conservative has a very specific political meaning, and to consider everyone that is "not woke" either conservative or alt-right shows a massive ignorance of the political landscape
Classic Liberal, or libertarian people still exist, we are here. The 1990's and 00's the battle was against conservatives wanting ti suppress speech, blame violence on video games, and all other manner of BS.
Today it seems the far left has also taken up the mantra of speech suppression, and blame video games for all manner of social ill's,
It is the Horseshoe Theory of politics manifest in reality..
One can be "not woke" and at the same time, not conservative...
the " sizeable niche audience" is actually the sane people, the middle of the road people, the people that think both Extreme Conservatives, and Extreme "Leftists" are crazy....
As a bike riding, pot smoking, liberty minded hippie, perhaps becoming was the wrong word, but I have more in common with conservatives than the progressive activists.
When you say “except they don’t” and I am part of that group that has, my existence proves you wrong. But perhaps it was just my poor use of language
The key is in the way you're looking at it:
"I have more in common with conservatives than the progressive activists"
You didn't compare conservative activists with progressive activists, or conservative activists with progressives.
If you're comparing the mainstream views of one side with the extremes of the other, (or worse: a caricature of the other side that you've been told about) then of course you're going to find the other more extreme.
No I’m seeing the mainstream left get bullied into becoming the activist left and the moderate leftists like myself are now suddenly closer on the spectrum to moderate conservatives, because the bulk of the left wing went to the left extreme.
Leftists, following Marx, have material concerns. They DGAF about video games or pronouns. Perhaps "progressives" is the word to use, because there certainly is a noisy group of identity politicians who have sold what little dignity they once possessed to Capital, and we do need something to call them. Selling one's dignity to capitalists and war pigs is not a leftist thing to do, so they certainly aren't "far left".
you are correct in that they are a distinct group, however even if they are "selling out to capital" which I don't think they are, they are still very much Authoritarian Socially, and "left" Economically
So while they "Cultural Marxists" or Identity Marxists as they call themselves, may be different from your preferred economic marxism, they are still IMO part of the "far left Authoritarian" quadrant of say the political compass
Does anyone call herself an "Identity Marxist"? I suspect actual cultural Marxists like Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin, or Hall would be quite interested in studying the phenomenon of applying that label to people who have never considered the ownership of the means of production.
This is a problem with this whole line of thinking. We should be able to criticize identity politics as it is, for its excess and harmful effects. (Likewise, we should be able to praise it, for any praiseworthy qualities it might be observed to have.) Shoehorning in an association with Marxism is either a rhetorical crutch or a baseless slur. Marxism isn't a synonym for "bad"; it is a particular school of criticism.
I might be able to live with the term "Identity Stalinists"...
He makes some decent points but I can't watch his content without cringing at the persona he makes use of. I find it very painful, but I guess it has an audience. I can also imagine people saying the same thing about redlettermedia, which I do enjoy.
He ruined movies and series for me. I now keep seeing horrific mistakes. like: The team of heroes has 1 character without a back story so he was designed to die.
His zone is mainstream hollywood action movies, for every brilliant action movie that gets it you’ll have like 100 BS ones. I think what really annoys me about the critical drinker, and others like him on youtube, is that his essays focus on complaining about the most common denominator mainstream entertainment with very little awareness of art house films or international cinema. It seems that all he wants are cooler action movies.. which, yeah me too for sure but the criterion collection/channel is a thing as well.
I’m not feeling his complaining in general. He’d be easier to love if he would champion some cool underground films like Film Comment or whatever will.
What I love about the Fugitive is how slow the pace is and how relative down to earth the subject matter is. I find it difficult to watch action movies these days, with camera cuts every second and thirty seconds per scene. I’ve taken to watching Korean and Scandinavian shows on Netflix which I find far better paced.
Down to earth is the key I think. So many action films these days are "save the world" or some sort of incredibly over the top world-changing maguffin. Just a guy trying to escape going to prison for a crime he didn't commit is infinitely more relatable that it makes a massive train derailment seem down to earth.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent just came out this year. The plot was a bit over the top, but that was the point, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Blackkklansman came out the same year as this article, and even though it was more comedy drive then most action movies, it had a down to earth plot of a black policeman infiltrating the KKK organization.
I agree that most action movies today have a pretty seen-it-before grandiose plot. But movies with down-to-earth original plots still come out (occasionally).
> Down to earth is the key I think. So many action films these days are "save the world" or some sort of incredibly over the top world-changing maguffin.
Ran across this observation with regards to Die Hard: the first two movies had McClain as basically a beat cop who gets in over his head. The latter movies he's almost a superhero.
I thought the one with Jeremy Irons as Hans Gruber's brother in it (don't remember which part of the series this was) wasn't too bad either. TBH, I'd watch that one more for Irons' performance than anything else, so your point probably still stands.
That makes me realize another aspect I hate about modern movies. In the first Die Hard, McClain was suffering. That scene where he walks across broken glass, and then limps around the rest of the movie. It might not have been realistic, but at least it conveyed how hard and tiring it is to fight. That is totally absent from modern action movies.
Oh absolutely! This has been a major annoyance in, mostly, superhero movies. The first movie they're growing up, maybe getting rid of a city's villain. The next movie they're saving the universe. (And in the third they're traveling back through time.)
This was my EXACT thought seeing the second Captain America. Taking down all of Shield/Hydra should have been an Avengers movie, not the job of a single dude.
Should have been a much more down to earth story about him adjusting to modern day, getting his groove back and taking on some minor baddie.
And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”
J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.
“I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
"Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”
Some scholars would argue that this began with the era of the phonograph, the telephone, and the airplane. I tend to agree - we've been in this for a long time.
Authenticity and 'the genuine' were discussed obsessively by (all?) early 20th Century thinkers in response to the first signs of the beginning of our modern social experience.
I blame comic book movies and a generation raised on them.
Comic book movies are also "ur fascism." They feature utterly paper thin heroes who are just good and paper thin villains that are either just bad or have caricatured motives. Thanos with his genocidal malthusianism is about as high-brow as this stuff gets.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the generation raised on these has been softened up for puerile political zealotry (of various stripes) in adulthood.
Go back and watch an action flick like Die Hard. Such movies were considered lowbrow when they were made but that film contains some extremely complex characterization and nuance compared to 90% of comic book films.
I really don’t think this is a coincident either. But I think it is more nefarious then you suggest. I blame the USA military. Too many movies that come out today are paper thin propaganda/recruitment tool for the USA military. If your story involves the military in some way, includes some military tools in the set design, etc. and you want the military to help you with that, then you must hand over editorial rights to the military (i.e. you must opt into censoring).
This creates an interesting phenomena where you are either more creative with your screenplay (and restrictive with your budget) or you cave in to censorship. I feel like most of the time Hollywood picks the latter.
That said, Hollywood is still making good original action movies (the most recent being The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), they are just really scarce among a plethora of military propaganda and/or superhero sequels (e.g. Top Gun: Maverick).
IMO a bigger aspect is just the exhaustion of the artistic medium itself and exhaustion of creative talent.
I think we tend to view the major artistic mediums that we are born into as something eternal when in reality they get stale.
Whatever can be said about movies I am sure people were saying 50-100 years ago about paintings.
Or think about the last great sculpture?
The same thing with movies has happened with music. The LP was nothing until the 1950s but it feels like something eternal. Creative people move on to newer mediums that are a blank canvas so to speak. Youtube, Tiktok, podcasts, long series TV.
I think as you age obviously it becomes harder to impress just from having consumed so many masterpieces of artistic expression. You have a much higher tolerance for amazement.
I think superhero movies are totally unwatchable but I am sure this would be different if I was starting closer to a blank slate when it comes to movie expectations. I love mob movies but there is no grand comment on society that caused all these mob movies to have been made outside a type of fashion trend.
You know, that's a really great point. In some cases it seems to be cyclic with some artistic mediums falling into and out of fashion as major canvases for artists to express themselves.
Maybe music and movies are just on a downswing for a while, having been thoroughly explored by previous artists.
I don’t think movies and music are on a downswing currently. I think they the consumption is just transitioning into more and more pulp. If you compare literature and pick a new novel completely by random you will most likely pick a dumb romance novel written in less then a day (perhaps mostly by AI). However that is hardly an indicator of the state of the art. I think movies and music is undergoing a similar transition that books went through in the 1950s. Consumption is getting easier and cheaper with streaming service, and the market is being flooded with cheap and easy productions. However—just like literature—great works are still being made, and will continue to be made into the foreseeable future. It just won’t be as prominently displayed as during the heyday of these mediums.
I rewatched The Longest Day last night, and appreciated much the same things in that. It's an action movie in a completely different style to something more modern, with some spectacularly long shots, and very little exposition. I was also struck by just how little dialogue there is for a three hour film, and how much of what dialogue there is was in subtitled German.
"I find it difficult to watch action movies these days, with camera cuts every second and thirty seconds per scene."
You know that dream most people have had, where they're running down the hallway that never ends, or running away from something they can't escape, or swimming up through endless water, or any of a dozen variations on the theme of reality no longer being composed of length and distance and height but instead being just a geometrically featureless abstraction of whatever experiential idea is currently stuck in your head?
Modern Hollywood action feels like that to me. There's no geography. Nothing changes because no matter how hard you punch the superheros (whether or not this is formally a superhero movie) they don't even so much as get their hair mussed. Things break and fall down, people get flung into concrete walls and break the concrete walls and pop back up so often it has lost all impact, you can't get your bearings on anything, you can't figure out where things are, nobody's winning or losing, it's not in any particular place, it's just never ending inescapable abstraction of fighting ideation, until the director or writer just decides it's over for basically no reason and we go on to the next thing, no different than a nightmare finally breaking not because you got away from the thing (you can't, it's in your head with you) but just because it is later.
Modern Hollywood action feels like that sort of nightmare you can't escape from for me... not the one that has you waking up drenched in sweat and terror, not the night terror nightmare, but the nightmare that drones on and on and doesn't let you go and makes no particular sense and you just can't get out of, with no real place or concrete events or anything else to hook your attention on to and break out of the loop.
Needless to say, I'm not particularly excited about throwing my money at them to produce this feeling in me.
(The last fight I really remember was the last on in Serenity. It sure isn't an action extravaganza like a Marvel movie, but that fight impacts everything and everybody. As Malcolm Reynolds hobbles away from that confrontation, there is no question. Something has happened. It happened in a place, and there was a sequence of events, that followed logic and biology. Events logically led up to it and consequences radiated out from it. Serenity isn't the greatest action movie in history or anything, the fight in the bar of the same movie also feels like the nightmare I describe above, it's just the last scene is the last fight I remember that impacted me.)
Watch Tarantino movies. "The Hateful Eight" in particular was fantastic. It doesnt look like an action movie, but as someone who really enjoys small details of realism it felt like a very good action movie.
It's important to note that "The Fugitive" was a remake of a 60s TV show by the same name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fugitive_(1963_TV_series)), which is only briefly mentioned in the article. That's probably the origin of the down-to-earth storyline and also the relatively corny stuff like the one armed man. I wonder if the script would have had a chance even in the nineties if it would have been an original script rather than a remake of a relatively successful (4 seasons, 120 episodes) TV series.
And trying to recycle what makes money is not something Hollywood stopped doing. It just keeps doing it over and over. New ideas are risky, how about another Batman reboot?
I assume the reason is that it's not about a super hero and/or it can't have 5 prequels and 7 sequels spun off if it. Seriously, why can't we just have an occasional great story that has an ending?
I wouldn't really call U.S. Marshals a sequel, per se. It's more a film that takes place in the same universe as The Fugitive and features many of the same characters.
In the genre of the 30-years-later follow-up, I actually wouldn't mind another spin-off from The Fugitive ... if it followed the same format, and was as tightly written as the original.
> Seriously, why can't we just have an occasional great story that has an ending?
China.
Foreign markets are now a significant chunk of the big studios' movie profits. If the story isn't super direct and generic, it won't work in translation, and that will cost money.
Are you sure? China's quota system makes it pretty hard for Hollywood films to make it in China [0]. Only a few of the absolute biggest films will have a chance of releasing in China.
It's not that films actually get into Chinese theaters. They all try. Some of them get to run in Chinese theaters, and those that do tend to make bank. However, those are chosen by theater owners to fill a limited number of spots, so theater owners want to make sure that it is a hit before buying.
Additionally, the Chinese censors will cut off all movies from a studio if that studio produces anything that goes against the party. Disney was blocked between 1996 and 1998 for producing a movie about Tibet. A movie that was never intended for the Chinese market at all, but one that went against the party narrative.
As I understand it , China is a bigger market for Hollywood than the US at this point. A lot of Blockblusters are written around what will fly in China and what wont cause CCP censors to object.
That said, I dont have a ready source for this but I definitely have read it before somewhere.
> As I understand it , China is a bigger market for Hollywood than the US at this point.
Definitely not at this point. There was a point it looked likely five years ago, but US box office is holding up better than expected, and the Chinese government increasingly block release of the vast majority of US films.
More generally, compare worldwide box with domestic. There are films that gross 10x oversees selling "American blockbusters" that all but flop in the US. It's why so many film franchises have felt so puzzling, disconnected, and out of place over the past twenty years.
Hollywood doesn't make film for Americans any more than the baubles at tourist traps give insight into local life.
Art produced for massive audiences typically requires a massive investment, so it’s produced with the same concerns as other massive investments.
Arthouse films still exist, but you know, there does seem to be something unique about an action movie that wraps itself up. I wonder if they’re out there.
Movies in the past were made for mass audiences. But they existed in a world before social media, cell phones, podcasts, streaming tv and all the other entertainment we have now.
People who enjoyed movies such as The Fugitive do not go to cinemas anymore as much. Cinema going audiences shrunk severly. The only reliable market is kids movies, superhero movies and established franchises.
but I am too jaded, corporate hollywood banks on safe movies, remakes/prequels/sequels. Its because its guaranteed profit that makes accountants happy.
That's why we hardly get anything interesting movies to see, nobody is allowed to risk or have their vision.
Also cinemas have been largely monopolized and deal with big producers mainly. Tarantino gave an interview about how (i think) hateful 8 was push out of schedule because disney demanded from multiplex only disney releases in given time frame.
And lastly I personally HATE average movie goer, talking, phones, eating snacks like pigs. I'd rather watch it home
The box office was apparently like 4x the budget. Are those directly comparable? It seems to me that, even if they aren't making Disney money, a studio ought to be able to keep the lights on if they can reliably quadruple their investments.
A) not all movies break even, most lose money, so the "hits" are needed to keep the lights on. It's not unlike VC investing.
Ironically small movies tend to lose money because they're small, telling small stories, with small ambitions. Ultimately these don't attract much of a cinema audience, and even those who enjoy them won't necessarily encourage others because (B). Streaming is a new, and perfect market for these with a very wide global audience - but making it for streaming takes out all the upside, even further constraining the budget.
There is no "community" (aka audience) already in place for some random new action movie. It costs a fortune to make, and returns are highly variable.
Contrast this with star-*, marvel, James bond, Tolkien etc. There's a pre-established market for these. If your gonna spend North of 100 million (or a billion for LOTR) there better be some expectation there.
Which brings us to (B).
B) - why go watch it in a cinema? Growing up my TV was tiny, sound was rubbish, quality was bad. And cinema was cheap. It really was "better on the big screen". Now my TV is huge, sound is amazing, I can pause to go yo the loo. And a month on streaming costs less than a single movie ticket.
Sure there are still movies made for the big screen - Top Gun Maverick is grand in scope and beautifully filmed, and imax worthy. And Tom worked hard for 3 years convincing people to go see it (spoiler: worth the wait.) it's a sequel, barely, not a franchise - but we very much know the movie we are going to see.
The point being that that is the first time I've been to a cinema in 3 years. Before that I've seen maybe one a year, much less an average. I figure 99% of the movies I watch now are at home.
To those complaining about all movies being Marvel, well clearly they aren't. But if you want variety in movies then the cinema is not the place to look. The variety is now on streaming where small movies with modest budgets can better reach a wider shallower audience.
Having worked in art-house cinema for a while I beg to differ. Not only big action movies work in cinemas. Also art-house and specially quiet or slow movies tend to have a better effect and deeper experience in cinema. Often because of the fact that you can not pause and go to the loo or check your phone or get some other way distracted.
This does work better in art-house cinemas with quiet and invested audience. And people are different, audiences are different and peoples home watching experiences are different. But I can see clearly how the longer I work in cinema the more I prefer watching a movie in big screen instead at home. Even if I just watch it alone in big auditorium. Both for the ritual of taking the time out from other activities and completely focusing on the movie and enjoyment that good camerawork, acting, set-design and sound come better our on the big screen.
Obviously every viewing experience is different. In the end movie watching is experience between the viewer, film and co-audience. I have had many unforgettable evenings with very run down equipment or small screens. But I do feel that in our more and more distracted times cinemas carry a good function to present a film in distraction free setting, with good quality and mood supporting environment.
In addition to the technical quality I have learned to enjoy more and more how much enjoyment it is if someone knowable has made a choices and put together a film program. Like any good curator it brings out options I would never know to look for myself or would not really investigate because of my biases. Sadly it is finically more easy to sustain this kind of program in film festivals not in everyday cinemas.
Clearly I'm not saying that cinema is dead - or that no-one is going to the cinema. I'm saying that small art films appears to small audiences, and so finding the number of willing watchers in a given location, which add enough loot into the system to keep both the cinema open, and also the film-makers in the black is getting hard.
Tickets are expensive enough to keep me at home, and while watching in a cinema can be fun there are also times it's less so. Some theaters have better seats, others are worse and so on. Ultimately distributing movies via cinema's adds a very high cost to me seeing it. And in 99% of cases I consider that cost untenable.
So, I'm not saying the cinema approach is bad, just that outside of some very narrow places there just isn't the demand enough to keep a cinema open, much less make any kind of dent in the profitability of the movie itself.
Got to remember the studio only actually gets around 50-60% of the box office, and budgets don’t include advertising. A 2.5x or 3x box office is around break even
I’ll offer “Riders of Justice” as an excellent recent movie that was marketed as an action film but which (while containing some action) is much more character driven.
You can write a lot of words but the fact is there's just an international appetite for movies with big American stars and lots of bullets. I think Mile 22 is the type exemplar. These are movies that you can watch dubbed, subtitled or even without translation and probably enjoy if you just want action. They're not making any political allegories. People are heroes because they help their friends or are faithful to their cause. They can get the rubber stamp of approval from any authoritarian government. They're even set in fake countries (Indocarr?) with Asian antagonists filmed in Colombia.
I'm hoping that we will see people get bored of these films and the international audience will start demanding more story and character development. Until then, well....
It's worth noting out bigger movies often need to target non English speaking audiences.
So any complex dialogue or nuance is off the table.
The average Marvel movie can have it's voice acting replaced by cat noises and you'll still get the gist.
I am very happy to see the cost of filmmaking drop so much though, I will lightly never see a big budget movie in a a cinema again. But there are tons of small movies I love to see.
I'd rather support a movie with a budget of a few million, then support a blockbuster which is censored to fit the political needs of various countries around the world
1. English is an unusually compact language. If you watch dubbed movies you will notice that the characters often have to talk extremely fast compared to the original and much dialogue is rephrased to be simpler. They can't refilm the sequences so in languages that take more words, the dialogue must be simplified.
2. A lot of people won't get dubbed versions anyway, so they'll be watching it as a foreign language.
As a non-native who watches everything subtitled because that's what everyone does, we have no problem following complex storylines. We have a language and competent translators.
And that's why I said "nobody thinks that", indeed.
Nonetheless, you seem to be fluent. Lots of people around the world speak some English but aren't fluent, don't get dubbing or subtitles into their own language for every film (or do but way late and they don't want to wait), and some of those people could in fact struggle to follow complex dialogue or might misunderstand idioms.
> While “old-man action” movies like Taken and The Equalizer could be considered descendants of The Fugitive, they lack its character development. Those thrillers that are character driven—say, No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water—are less popcorn, more art.
iow, don't discuss because the goalposts will be moved aggressively.
This is all that needed to be said. Aside from all the other many examples from the post-90s, Upgrade is basically the formula the author is asking for and it came out the same summer this article was written. Hollywood still makes plenty of these types of films, probably more now than before thanks to helicopter money from streaming services. Take Triple Frontier, Extraction just from the last two years. I'm not going to say those are particularly good, but they're exactly the formula the author claims no longer gets made.
The actual difference is these types of movies are no longer tentpoles.
One of the things that has been bothering me for a while is Hollywood’s obsession with throwing sex scenes into every movie. It bothers me because this makes them unwatchable with my children.
Two examples: Queen’s Gambit an Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos). Both wonderful stories. The sex scenes are utterly unnecessary. There’s even an oral sex scene in one of Galactica’s episodes.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Also, for all their purported values they sure have no problem at all exploiting women in such ways.
This isn’t about being a prude at all. I am not. The sex and objectification of women in movies adds nothing valuable to the story and is a net negative for society. If you don’t agree, just wait until you have a daughter to view the world they are exposed to with a different perspective.
I would agree, but I haven't actually seen a hollywood movie in so long that I must admit I'm not qualified to actually have an opinion on movie trends. How do people hear about new movies these days?
I live pretty close to a movie theater. And I look at their posters and marquee regularly. Then when I’m in the theater, I usually watch the trailers they show before the movie starts.
what about Prisoners, In the bedroom, The guilty (2018), Good time, Oldboy (original, not from Hollywood though), Collateral, End of watch, Training day, Drive, etc. - all these were released after and they are better movies (most of them more thrillers than action though, but some straight up action), I can't really recommend exactly same alternative since I don't watch stupid action flicks like Fugitive, now that I have much more options than in 90s
Edge of Tomorrow is another very good sci-fi non franchise film. Also Dredd 2012 which is a comic book film, with an awesome design, but it's fully standalone.
For now. They've been trying to get an Edge of Tomorrow sequel movie going since about a year after the original, and earlier this year announced a TV series spinoff.
I haven't seen the rest, but Collateral/Oldboy/Training day were so good, that I have to watch the rest now. I especially loved Collateral, the atmosphere was masterfully done to evoke feelings of stress.
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
I remember my friends and I laughing as we left the theater about it being a modeling shoot for Ryan Gosling. We expected something with the feel of Baby Driver - it was nothing like that.
“Does this guy ever quit?”. In relation to the speed of the film, and the way the story is presented with an ever increasing suspense/action, The Fugitive reminds me of Billy Friedkin's films, The French Contact and The Exorcist (and maybe To Live and Die in L.A.), they are films that simply do not let you breathe, and you leave the theater with the certainty that you have just lived a unique experience.
Mann likes to savor the cultural and visual environments his movies take place in. That makes them (later ones like Collateral, and especially Miami Vice and Blackhat) too slow for a mass audience.
There was an essay I can't find about how non-US, European audiences appreciate that kind of thing much more.
Mann's movies don't have endless thrills and they end on a slightly positive to neutral note, not like romances or action movies where the end is supremely positive. Instead, some problem has been averted, but nobody's saved the world. Any positive elements (couple living happily ever after, wounded cop surviving) are tempered by a strong sense of malaise that nothing's keeping the same thing from happening again tomorrow.
I enjoyed it supremely for two reasons: I've seen my share of crime media, from Western to Italian-American and the Yakuza angle is something I only ever seen in video games and I loved seeing serious Western TV about Japanese crime. It felt like "Yakuza Zero: the spin-off TV show". They also have their version of Kazuma Kiryu in the making.
And also because I'm done with the stereotype spread by countless weekend tourists that Japan is perfect, everyone is nice and nothing bad ever happens. The representation of the casual racism gaijin experience without making it a political movie was masterful in my opinion. Also, the corruption, the dysfunctional police, the seedy hostess clubs and having the courage of making it a bilingual show.
Collateral is great, although it only came out a few years after the 90s ended (2004). Since then it seems Tom Cruise has mostly been making sequels to Mission Impossible and now Top Gun.
He's since done 6 sequels (4 x MI, 1 x Jack Reacher, 1 x Top Gun), and about 10 non-sequels (War of the Worlds, Lions for Lambs, Valkyrie, Knight and Day, Jack Reacher, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy, American Made).
Oh, I don't know. My respect for Cruise has gone up quite a bit. The MI series is formulaic but he does put a lot of effort and soul into his work. Top Gun was a slap in the face to formula films. Some of his smaller projects (like Jack Reacher) were fun to watch too. Collateral is an underrated classic though.
I felt that it went against several of the popular things in movies these days. It was comparatively low on CGI. It had a prominent male lead character without a female character supporting in the main plotline. Someone else mentioned on this discussion about Chinese funding. They took a decision than angered the investors there and, I believe, caused them to pull out https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/02/media/top-gun-maverick-ta...
Maybe I'm overthinking it. I saw the first one as a kid and spent a lot of time doing dogfights with my toy planes since. The nostalgia hit me quite hard and it genuinely felt like a nice sequel which retained the macho 80s spirit of the original. I've never felt that with other modern movies.
> I felt that it went against several of the popular things in movies these days. It was comparatively low on CGI.
Low-CGI / practical effects is part of the Tom Cruise formula though. You go to his movies to see him do crazy things (with a requisite running scene). Kind of like OG Jackie Chan movies: you watch them for his stunts.
I sort of assumed Top Gun doubled back on appeasing the Chinese censors because the Chinese censors wouldn’t really be interested in a movie that glorifies the US military in the first place.
Wasn't the Jason Bourne films character driven adult action? I found those films compelling because I felt I was discovering Bourne's character along with him.
Identity and Supremacy, I think it's fair to say. Bourne has a certain vulnerability and both cat and mouse are sympathetic and compelling characters. By the time I got to Ultimatum and beyond it felt mostly like it was milking the franchise and covering the same ground over and over.
A note here: The Bourne Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum are based in books (which have a better, richer and kinda different story when compared to the movies ).
I read Bourne Supremacy and could barely stop laughing from all the hoary Chinese stereotypes. Ludlum’s editor must have been on vacation. Any of the Matarese books were better than that one.
If you want a good series that's more "realistic" but along the same lines of interesting cat / mouse play, check out the John Rain series by Barry Eisler. It's extremely, meticulously well researched.
Oh, and it's more recent, so you can see how it works with modern day technology rearing its head.
Ludlums books often had issues with the final act, he didn't seem comfortable with endings so things often just get very extreme and almost "and then the world blew up" at the end.
The Jason Bourne films were fast-editing driven adult action. The character was an emotional blank slate infused with innate combat and spycraft knowledge, perfect for the audience to self-insert into for a power fantasy. What really drove that movie wasn't the character, but the snappy action editing.
Bourne movie is responsible for a decade of shaking cam misery. Only very rare cinematographers got it right, like in "District 9", for the most part it was just chaotic incomprehensible mess.
That is kind of Paul Greengrass’ thing. He carried it over directly from “Bloody Sunday” (which is pretty good!) which is why the second Bourne film is so visually distinct from the first.
He keeps things more legible than most who try, but yea… I’m glad that style has mostly died out.
As someone who likes Identity and didn't really care for the rest I think Doug Liman is just a really good director that occasionally has issues with bad scripts (jumper.)
One big thing people don't talk about enough is the curation/marketing pipeline we used to have with movies.
You'd see some glimpses of a new project via live televisionm which was the only way to stay connected to everyone.
Then you'd maybe watch it in the theater.
and here's the important part, there was a 9+ month delay from a release in a theater to being able to watch it free of charge on television. So you'd go to blockbuster and you'd open the door and look above the employees.
And there'd be a marquee with all the new movie titles you'd probably recognize from the movie theater advertising onslaught you watched.
Now there is no live television. everyone pays for streamers so we don't watch movie commercials anymore.
And I don't go to blockbuster and there's no list of new releases.
Now a huge star will be in a film that no ones ever heard of, that used to never happen.
When I was younger, I practically couldn't avoid knowing what movies were coming.
Now I have no idea.
But I have been hearing about Top Gun and Elvis. So that's a good start.
But after all that, I have to say the Fugitive is one of my favorite movies.
Perhaps you're also getting older, the old way of doing things you lost track of what was coming out because you had kids and you didn't go to the movies that much so you didn't see the coming attractions.
If you spent a lot of time going through YouTube you might know what all the coming attractions were?
> When I was younger, I practically couldn't avoid knowing what movies were coming.
> Now I have no idea.
Indeed: A sequel I knew was coming and was looking forward to, I had no idea was in theatres two months ago. Just found out sometime last week it had been released.
> “Does this guy ever quit?” one of the marshals asks toward the end of The Fugitive, and the answer is no—both for Dr. Richard Kimble and for Davis. For two hours and 10 minutes, this film does not relent. Not even for a cup of coffee (that scene was cut), not even for some shopping (cut), not even for romance (also cut). There is no hanging out here. Everything rushes. If it isn’t the actors, then it’s the camera with a Where’s Waldo? view of Chicago, the hometown of both Kimble and Davis; if it isn’t the camera, then it’s the swelling orchestral music.
This description of brutal cuts to a film in order to keep it tight and cohesive reminds me of one of the themes from Pompo: The Cinéphile, where the director struggles with cutting out massive swaths of footage from his film to keep it under 90 minutes. Or is this how all films are made?
>> “The basic underpinnings don’t have any soul or value,” he told The New York Times. “They’re totally incredible so you don’t believe them. They’re dumb stories.”
And here we are in world dominated by superhero movies, all based on Save the Cat.
Edit: And yet later in the article we have this quote:
>> The Fugitive’s success relies as much on plausibility as it does on velocity. Despite the soaring set pieces, the film somehow manages to remain grounded in a kind of palpable reality. “It is just so nice to watch a movie about normal smart people instead of insane super geniuses,”
It might be, as some have alluded to, the fact that we don't have these kinds of films with broad, blockbuster appeal anymore. They still get made, but very few pieces of mass media break through to the mass market "water cooler" chat.
Is there any good source for indie movies? I would like to watch more of non Hollywood style movies. Or at least fewer remakes and superhero style movies.
Only half joking, but we could also stop making movies altogether. And writing novels or songs. We have enough of high quality media at this point that one life is not enough to consume it all.
John Wick is a fun movie series that dispenses with the seriousness and is just fun, admittedly violent fun. The third movie opens with a madcap sequence where he kills a guy using a book, followed by hallway melee knife fight that is pure slapstick.
I honestly don't understand this movie franchise and all the praise it gets. It is as if the creators were _the hell with story, who cares, we just need action sequences_.
There's absolutely no story. Zilch. Nil. Why is this movie praised?
That's kind of the point. The movies were directed by two stunt men who had worked with Keanu Reeves on The Matrix. To me it feels like an American version of a movie like "The Raid"[1], though not quite as grounded.
I think it's praised because the kind of "down to earth" action movies like the first John Wick are pretty rare these days. Superhero movie fights are generally about the spectacle of superhumans shooting various lasers at each other. They are also often entirely CG. This makes John Wick fee more much more "real" by comparison. More Die Hard and less Man of Steel.
Can't speak for everyone, but for me its a handful of things:
1. The action sequences. While we are mostly past the era of "shaky" cam fight scenes, we still have a lot of bad action choreographing. I'm thinking of "The Dark Knight Rises" style fighting where bad guys with guns kind of just fumble around and wait for Batman to get close and pummel them. John Wick is over the top, but it still feels grounded in reality, as it feels like the characters are fighting in a way in which they realistically could be killed by a single gunshot. That's relatively unique in action movies today.
2. The world building. The series is very good about "show, don't tell". It doesn't come right out and explain everything about the structure of this underground society of assassins and criminals, their codes of conduct, their relationships, etc. It slowly reveals them over the course of the movie, and often not through exposition but simply through the character's living and interacting in the world that's been created. I think most people find this kind of storytelling more satisfying.
3. The simplicity of the story. The premise is absurdly simple. A former assassin is wronged at the lowest point of his life. He decides to get revenge. Literally all 3 movies take place over the course of like a week and the entirety of the plot is just the continuation and fallout of that initial premise. People aren't saving the world. There are no large governments involved, no super-powers, no MacGuffins, no overly convoluted plans. I think that gives the movies a grounded feeling that isn't common in big budget action movies.
For exactly that reason. Sometimes people just want mindless action and fun setpieces, and John Wick movies respect that. Many action movies try and force in some inane plot, or add a romance subplot, or digress from the actual point of the movie: Action and spectacle.
It's not my cup of tea, but I certainly respect it for knowing exactly what it is.
Not only that but the action itself is superb. The way the hand to hand combat and gunplay is choreographed, performed and filmed is miles ahead of many films with much bigger budgets.
Good to know, now I can remove those movies from my to-watch list. I don't mind some action, but it has to serve a purpose in the plot. Action just for the action is just so boring, IMO.
There is a plot to the John Wick movies, it's just not very deep. The plot can largely be summarised as "Wick was an assassin, but gave it up because his wife died, then some Bad People killed his dog. Wick is very upset by that, and will now express that via the medium of choreographed fight scenes". Also, there's a whole assassin sub-culture, which is wonderfully executed, if completely mad.
Overall the plot doesn't really make any sense, but it also doesn't need to, it's just a hook on which to hang some spectacular set pieces.
So I watched John Wick yesterday evening, and unfortunately I didn't like it.
I didn't feel invested in the main character at all, let alone any of the other characters. Was it the camera work, or the editing, or the acting, or the way the story was told? I don't know. In any case as a result I found the whole movie extremely boring.
Someone here mentioned Kill Bill which in a way has a similar story and over-the-top fighting scenes. But I do love Kill Bill (even though I think the fight with the Crazy 88 would have been better if it were not as long). I also found movies like The Transporter or Taken entertaining (which I think are more or less in the same genre as John Wick).
Then what exactly is it that makes me like some of these movies but not John Wick? I'm afraid I don't have the answer to that.
Not really, I actually think the continuity in the series is better than most series these days. I think that how you feel about the first movie will be a pretty good indication of how you feel about the sequels.
I think those movies are praised because no story is better than a bad story. Many recent "action" movies tries to have a story, which most of the time isn't great and just dilutes the action. John Wick doesn't waste time with that and gives you just what you want: action.
A sibling comment compared it to "The Raid", which I think is a fair comparaison. Both series are very action oriented, both have action scenes that are better than other action movies.
You can see it as a rejection of the idea that you need a bit of everything to create a good movie. Those movies are not balanced at all, but by focusing on their strengths instead of their weaknesses, they end up being good.
More specifically - they choreograph around what he is capable of completing. It’s clear that age and smoking are catching up with him in the third film.
You're probably right, but also: the three movies take place one right after the other, over the span of what, 2-3 weeks maybe? Kinda makes sense from a plot perspective that Wick might look a bit winded by the third movie.
There's nothing like a movie where the hero doesn't grow as a character. The tension from knowing he can't be harmed and has super hero like reflexes really makes me wonder if he'll make it out alive.
It seemed like a deliberate invocation of the 'kick the dog' trope. While crude and lazy villain writing, to invoke the trope so deliberately shows a degree of respect to the audience. It says the movie isn't going to waste your time by pretending to be something it isn't.
And it could have been a lot worse. If John Wick were a 70s revenge movie, I think it would have started with criminals killing John Wick's wife or daughter instead.
Yeah, I actually found that part of the plot effective and easy to relate with coming from my own experiences of loss. John is basically transferring all the pain and grief from losing his wife onto the puppy, and it gives him an outlet for his grief in the form of revenge. People criticize Keanu Reeves’ acting ability but the “I’m thinking I’m back” scene works for me.
Also, John Wick is such a badass of a character that they sort of need to overdo the part that makes him sympathetic to the audience or else he would just be terrifying. The movie actually plays on a lot of villain tropes for John Wick, like in all the scenes where the gangsters are terrified of him and telling stories about him. If you take out the part about the wife and dog, John Wick is basically a slasher movie where John is the vicious serial killer.
Unpopular opinion: The Fugitive is not a particularly good movie and Harrison Ford is not a particularly good actor.
I mean if one wants to write an article about the good action movies of the time maybe write about Heat?
And while I agree with the observation that we are seeing way too many entirely predictable movies made by the same patterns, I would argue The Fugitive was one of them at the time.
Still from time to time something very different comes along. I just watched "Everything, everywhere, all at Once". That is definitely not your typical Holywood fare, and was extremely surprising and enjoyable.
Heat wasn't a very good movie. It was full of clichés, esp. the female characters. The cop's wife cheats on him with a loser, to make her husband notice. The wife of a gangster is obsessed with kids and family. And of course the love interest of the protagonist doesn't have a clue about what he does or whohe is, she's an innocent white dove completely, well, clueless. Morals are also very loose, which makes the protagonists hard to relate to.
The Fugitive has very bad guys, which may be a little cliché too, but there is this ambiguous central character of the Marshal who has a great arc. At the beginning he's just doing his job and isn't interested in the least in the details of the case. He only digs into them because he thinks they may help with the chase. And as the movie progresses he warms up to the protagonist, until he saves him at the end. That's great.
One way to entirely ruin the movie would have been to insert scenes with the Marshal's wife where she would ask why he's never home, and scold him for missing his son's football game, etc.
Honestly, I love Heat and Michael Mann not because they are great movies all around, but because I love Michael Mann's aesthetics. I'm totally ok with the cliches and basic stories and just appreciate the glossy atmosphere.
I have to say, I don't agree that any of the items you point out as clichés are really clichés. A cop's wife cheating on her husband with a "loser" is a cliché? Are you sure you know what a cliché even is? Loose morals are a cliché? One wife of one of the gangsters in the movie is obsessed with family, aren't some people out of most people you meet obsessed with family? That's kind of a normal thing.
I would say, when compared to most action/suspense/thriller movies, Heat is one of the all-time greatest mostly because it defies most of the genre conventions. When I saw Heat, it amazed me because even 20 years later, it still seems incredibly fresh and original and unlike 99% of other movies of the same genre.
Heat is incredibly realistic, there are no out and out "pure" good guys or "pure" bad guys, very much like reality, everything is shades of grey. There is no winner in the story nor solely happy or bad ending, and the mechanics of the story both on the cops and robbers side is strongly grounded in reality and indeed based on real life stories from the police. The cast was extremely well trained by people experienced on both the "bad guy" side and the "good guy" side. The gunplay and heists are also extremely realistic, to the point that many elite armed forces use the gunplay and tactics in heat as training tools!
Yeah, sure, "normal", therefore cliché. Soccer moms are the bane of the movies. Just because you place a soccer mom in a gangster flick doesn't make it original, or courageous, or anything. It's boring and ridiculous.
Also, as a moviegoer, I really don't care how long the actors trained, how well, or by whom they were trained. I care about the result.
The result is a bunch of loud fighting, with boring and predictable domestic scenes in between. It glorifies violence and doesn't even do it well.
You're misinformed as the meaning of the word cliché, if that's your definition. Cliché != normal. Heat has a variety of different people with different families and different situations, it's realistic, it's not clichéd. Cliché implies an overused trope, especially one which is heavily featured or relied upon as a major element of the story. This "soccer mom" element (which I don't agree with to start with) is a very minor side aspect barely featuring for 1 or 2 minutes in the movie. The fact that you obsess over it so much is frankly weird to me.
Also, movie critics highly disagree with you and consider Heat to be one of the best crime/thrillers ever made, original, fresh, not clichéd, and the movie which every crime thriller which came after aspired to be.
Yes, cliché implies an overused trope; in Heat, all the female characters are clichés; most of the male characters are too (the main two, the exhausted but determined cop, and the super-pro bank robber, certainly are); and so are the situations and plot developments. The "one-last-big-score-that-goes-wrong" is so cliché it should be legislated against. Everything in that movie is utterly predictable.
As for movie critics, I'd rather form my own opinion than follow those of people who's profession is to sit in cinemas without even paying for their own tickets. But, while you're right that most reviews of Heat are very positive, there are plenty of critics who thought that movie was boring and cliché. Here's one for instance: https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/heat
"all the character-building information is cliched and uninteresting"
"About forty minutes of Heat is involving. The rest varies from humdrum to tedious. That's not a very good success rate."
"the long stretches of banal dialogue and formula plotting mute the impact of the staccato, bullet-laden bursts of energy"
None of this matters much, of course. I would feel the same if there were zero negative reviews.
"One way to entirely ruin the movie would have been to insert scenes with the Marshal's wife where she would ask why he's never home, and scold him for missing his son's football game, etc."
Heat was specifically about their personal relationships, so in that context it made sense.
Kelly Reichardt's First Cow (2019) distributed by A24 is a favorite of mine of recent years. Not from A24 but I saw Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) by the Brothers Quay a few weeks ago and thought it was interestingly good.
The popular/ist opinion is that movies are good if a lot of people like watching them and actors are good if people like them and like watching them in movies. And most people generally like predictability too, at least in some form or another. Movies and acting as high art doesn't really make an actor or movie good, by some objective standard.
I really can't stand Tarantino's stilted, artificial "dialogue" (read: tiresome monologues) for example, but people love the movies and love hearing about what the french call a quarter pounder. So they're good movies and it's good dialogue, despite my curmudgeon old ass muttering about how nobody speaks like that.
The story is insightful, heavy on philosophy, extremely ambiguous, and digs into interesting questions about a very viable future technology. On a superficial level one can take the ending (which does provide closure) at face value, but it was intended to make one think. It's based on a Philip K Dick short story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", and it shows.
It's a grandiose story, but only on the surface and only due to the fact it's set in the future. The plot is something that will affect everybody at some point. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd strongly recommend going in blind.