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Nihonniboku posted:Has network television actually gotten really bad? It seems like across the major networks (CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, CW), there are only a handful of shows worth watching. Abbott Elementary, and, anything else? Has network tv gotten worse? Or have we just gotten so used to quality shows on cable and streaming that our standards are that much higher, and network TV was always to varying degrees as bad as it is today? There was a recent episode of the Simpsons that blew my mind on how good it was, but 
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Nov 8, 2022 23:29
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Edward Mass posted:There was a recent episode of the Simpsons that blew my mind on how good it was, but The new Treehouse of Horror episode was surprisingly good. The jokes didn't feel lazy, they went more for a horror angle than a comedy, and there weren't any celebrity cameos shoehorned in. It was like a completely different show from the last 20 years.
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Nov 8, 2022 23:59
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The trick is to not be fooled by branding. Despite being 'set in the star wars universe' or whatever, Andor is a superior TV version of Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2. That's pretty easy since that movie sucks 
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Nov 9, 2022 00:29
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Apparently I'm the only person on the planet that liked Blade Runner 2. That movie is awesome.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:30
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I liked it too. It was very long and slow but it had a kind of meandering dreamlike vibe.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:31
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Field Mousepad posted:Apparently I'm the only person on the planet that liked Blade Runner 2. That movie is awesome. I don’t know where this swing in opinion came from; seemed like it was pretty well liked when it came out. I still like it. There are some things I would change but that’s true of the original as well.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:33
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Field Mousepad posted:Apparently I'm the only person on the planet that liked Blade Runner 2. That movie is awesome. No it was definitely great. I loved it. I thought it was generally well accepted.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:37
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Field Mousepad posted:Apparently I'm the only person on the planet that liked Blade Runner 2. That movie is awesome. That movie was awesome, I've watched it a few times and it's still fun
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Nov 9, 2022 01:38
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Goons always turn around and claim they've always hated popular acclaimed stuff after a few years. Happens a lot with games. Started watching Lower Decks and find it quite enjoyable. Turns out Star Trek is much better when every episode is 20 minutes and doesn't take itself seriously.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:45
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Field Mousepad posted:Apparently I'm the only person on the planet that liked Blade Runner 2. That movie is awesome.
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Nov 9, 2022 01:47
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ymgve posted:Goons always turn around and claim they've always hated popular acclaimed stuff after a few years. Happens a lot with games. i watched lower decks this month too and really liked it
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Nov 9, 2022 01:54
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mystes posted:I thought everyone in cinema discusso loved it when it came out? I don't know about Cinema discusso but almost every review and opinion I've read straight up trashed it. That might be just "online" people though
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Nov 9, 2022 01:57
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It’s just one of the latest movies that Film Twitter has decided is Actually Bad because a bunch of clickbait sites and accounts wrote hot take retrospectives on it.
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Nov 9, 2022 02:00
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‘Blade Runner 2049’ is just continuing the proud Blade Runner tradition of being grossly under appreciated upon its release. My hot (but sincere) take is that it may very well be superior to the original. I think I’d be totally rock solid in that opinion if the Jared Leto part had been played by David Bowie, as originally intended. Talk about a MAJOR downgrade…
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Nov 9, 2022 02:16
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Magic Pus posted:‘Blade Runner 2049’ is just continuing the proud Blade Runner tradition of being grossly under appreciated upon its release. My hot (but sincere) take is that it may very well be superior to the original. I think I’d be totally rock solid in that opinion if the Jared Leto part had been played by David Bowie, as originally intended. Talk about a MAJOR downgrade… In terms of overall enjoyment, I definitely liked it better than the original. The OG is good, and lord knows it set *the* bar for the visual interpretation of the future... but I just felt 2049 was more cohesive and better overall.
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Nov 9, 2022 02:21
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mystes posted:I thought everyone in cinema discusso loved it when it came out? It was pretty well regarded iirc, always some people that didn't enjoy a flick though. I thought it was very pretty and well cast but I didn't really care for the secret child plot stuff. Absolutely love the drone strike while she gets her nails done scene
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Nov 9, 2022 02:57
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Black Lighter posted:Hey, like I said before, I have no particular issue with the show itself, and I don't have any problem believing that it's good and well-made. This whole tangent started because someone said they were suspicious of all the praise it was getting for being kids' stuff finally taken seriously, and I related it to the way Marvel promoted similar arguments to help them grind everything into content. All I've been saying is that its place within that kind of brand management strategy makes it less appealing and interesting to me, even if it's good. Yeah, I think this speaks to an issue I've been having for several years now; to what end does it serve to talk about issues like social inequality, gender violence, etc. in a purely fictitious universe, like say, the Game of Thrones universe, that wouldn't be better served by talking about those issues in our present reality? Not that there isn't some obvious worth here, and Andor / Thrones / etc. are obviously further along the continuum of IP Does Issues than "I only understood Auschwitz when Rainbow Sparkle was photishopped into the death camp photoes" (or when Wonder Woman was, loving laffo), but it strikes me as, I dunno, a little varnished. A little bit of a way of helping the audience distance themselves from the issues at play. There'a something very funny about grown adults are having very serious conversations about the chronological history and politics of Targaryians and the Palpatines with the sort of fascination and eye for real politik that would traditionally be reserved for real world issues. Maybe I'm just -- for want of a better term -- aging out of this kind of discussion, I dunno. I certainly have, and still am, guilty of this thing I'm critiquing. Or perhaps more guilty in my ambivalence, I dunno. I have watched a lot of Star Wars Andor, but I'm also watching a lot of Babylon Berlin, and the latter strikes me as doing pretty much everything Andor does, but only better. And I think part of that is because it's operating in the real world, and talking about real world political parties, movements and concerns. There's not metaphorical abstraction at play (except when there is; there's still magical realism going on here). It perhaps the blockbuster trappings are an unfortunate reality of trying to talk about real world issues in a way that appeals to the mass market? Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 03:20
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Big Mean Jerk posted:It’s just one of the latest movies that Film Twitter has decided is Actually Bad because a bunch of clickbait sites and accounts wrote hot take retrospectives on it. The hate for Knives out is one that just puzzles me. It seems to mostly be centered around Craig’s accent but i don’t really have an ear for southern accents and it sounded fine to me!
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Nov 9, 2022 03:44
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Starks posted:The hate for Knives out is one that just puzzles me. It seems to mostly be centered around Craig’s accent but i don’t really have an ear for southern accents and it sounded fine to me! Yea, as someone from Alabama, it sounds legit for rural Kentucky. I'm not sure what the loving deal is with those idiots...
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Nov 9, 2022 03:46
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The larger creative palette provided by genre filmmaking allows for a level of spectacle, absurdity and weirdness that you can't as easily convey when the setting is entirely realistic, I value those attributes in the media I consume. That you're somehow only on the cusp of understanding one of the core ideas behind sci-fi and fantasy, that it's used as a soft allegory to real world politics and sociological issues so as to explore them without stepping on peoples toes, is pretty amazing. Star Trek was explicitly open about doing exactly this and it's from the 60s.
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Nov 9, 2022 03:54
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SCheeseman posted:That you're somehow only on the cusp of understanding one of the core ideas behind sci-fi and fantasy, that it's used as a soft allegory to real world politics and sociological issues so as to explore them without stepping on peoples toes, is pretty amazing. Star Trek was explicitly open about doing exactly this and it's from the 60s. I mean, I'm not. My point is (or, tbh, one of my points is) that, for me personally, I'm beginning to find diminishing returns in a certain kind of fan interaction that I engage with and a certain kind of metaphor that I interact with, and yet I still find myself interacting with them anyway. That said, I can see why my point wouldn't come across, my post was kludged together pretty badly.
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Nov 9, 2022 04:04
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What’s a fan interaction? Do you mean you don’t like mainstream comic book poo poo but you used to?
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Nov 9, 2022 04:20
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Metropolis was such a lovely fantasy movie why couldn't they just show life in a real Weimar city!
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Nov 9, 2022 04:31
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SCheeseman posted:The larger creative palette provided by genre filmmaking allows for a level of spectacle, absurdity and weirdness that you can't as easily convey when the setting is entirely realistic, I value those attributes in the media I consume. Yeah, and that was really impressive in the 60s, when the Hays code was still technically in effect and a wide range of topics were outright banned from television. We've had sixty years since then in which media has supposedly grown and matured, but if we're back to a point where real world politics and sociological issues can only be explored through the distance provided by a fantasy setting, that's really disappointing. And that's not a knock on Andor or the people who made it or the people who enjoy it, either. To OpenSourceIdiom's point, yeah, real world politics and issues are probably better addressed directly, but that doesn't mean allegory can't also be a useful tool. It only really becomes an issue when it's the only tool that filmmakers are allowed to use because the studios and networks are terrified of making anything that directly reflects and addresses the world around us. It can still be refreshing to find stuff like that when the mainstream media landscape is so bleak, but after a decade or so of mostly nothing but that, it's hard not to find allegory a little stale and unsatisfying. Starks posted:The hate for Knives out is one that just puzzles me. It seems to mostly be centered around Craig’s accent but i don’t really have an ear for southern accents and it sounded fine to me! I think that's just a case of film Twitter hating something because it was a smaller movie that got really popular with people who didn't go to film school. See also Ari Aster's movies.
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Nov 9, 2022 04:42
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I'm not intending this to be a dig, but Black Lighter and OpenSourceIdiom I feel like you should both do some light Internet research on how writers in Europe reacted to the idea of the novel when it became the big thing. Your argument is starting to sound less like "Sci-Fi is for children" and more like "fiction is bad", which other posters are reacting to with derision (maybe rightly so) because that's a topic that's been recycled over and over for like hundreds of years.
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Nov 9, 2022 04:55
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Famethrowa posted:Metropolis was such a lovely fantasy movie why couldn't they just show life in a real Weimar city! They did do that, tho. They made lots of movies that did exactly that; hell, Fritz Lang's other massively well-known movie is a straight-up sociological study of a city besieged by a killer. We mostly don't make those kinds of movies on a mainstream level anymore; we make fantasy franchise goop. And sometimes it's good goop, but when it's all that's being offered, even the good stuff feels tiresome. Stayne Falls posted:I'm not intending this to be a dig, but Black Lighter and OpenSourceIdiom I feel like you should both do some light Internet research on how writers in Europe reacted to the idea of the novel when it became the big thing. Your argument is starting to sound less like "Sci-Fi is for children" and more like "fiction is bad" I'm not saying either of those things, tho. I'm saying that a media landscape dominated almost exclusively by IP-driven fantasy franchises is bad, and diminishes good work done within them. Black Lighter fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 04:55
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Black Lighter posted:Yeah, and that was really impressive in the 60s, when the Hays code was still technically in effect and a wide range of topics were outright banned from television. We've had sixty years since then in which media has supposedly grown and matured, but if we're back to a point where real world politics and sociological issues can only be explored through the distance provided by a fantasy setting, that's really disappointing. Using metaphor to soften messaging isn't new, it's about as old as storytelling itself. 60 years of "maturity", whatever that is supposed to mean, isn't going to stop people from using it and being disappointed by that is a ridiculous waste of your time.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:20
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Black Lighter posted:I'm not saying either of those things, tho. I'm saying that a media landscape dominated almost exclusively by IP-driven fantasy franchises is bad, and diminishes good work done within them.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:25
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Black Lighter posted:I'm not saying either of those things, tho. I'm saying that a media landscape dominated almost exclusively by IP-driven fantasy franchises is bad, and diminishes good work done within them. It's actually dominated by reality TV and a seemingly endless supply of "realistic" and "grounded" (load bearing quotes) procedural crime dramas.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:26
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I love fiction, I don't think that's going to change. I think there's just a frustrating distantiation effect when it comes to some forms of fiction that makes it easier to disavow the political content and therefore makes it harder to make the jump between the metaphor and the real world. The fantasy element makes the message easier to communicate, but I think something is also traded off in the wholesale packaging of the message in a completely fictional context. To what degree that affects the thesis, and to what degree that it's a problem, is going to differ from person to person (for me, in the case of Andor, a little and not really, respectively), but I think it's ultimately functionally, definitionally, true that metaphor acts to distance the point of discourse slightly further from reality than it would otherwise be. Like I said before, I think this is why Babylon Berlin (which is pulpy magical realist historical fiction) works better for me as an examination of fascism than Andor (pulpy epic science fiction/fantasy) does. Not that Andor is a bad show, at all, but the conversations it opens -- including ones i find interesting and motivating -- can sometimes just be issues that seem to only relevant in terms of how they resonate with the IP. Again, I'm not saying Andor is bad, or that fiction is bad, or that science fiction is bad, or pulp is bad. I'm just sympathetic to Black Lighter's point about the slightly deadening effect of packaging these messages within IP. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 05:41
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I just don't want the effect of Andor's praise to be "ah we should make all of Star Wars like this." It's solemn enough as is, every single movie has some big line about "this is how rebellion starts" because it'd look good on a T-shirt. It's like how Watchmen was a really great comic book but it gave a lot of people the idea that they needed to make comics more like Watchmen and that leads you to Elongated Man's wife being raped and murdered so that Batman can feel betrayed.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:43
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Open Source Idiom posted:I love fiction, I don't think that's going to change. I think there's just a frustrating distantiation effect when it comes to some forms of fiction that makes it easier to disavow the political content and therefore makes it harder to make the jump between the metaphor and the real world. The fantasy element makes the message easier to communicate, but I think something is also traded off in the wholesale packaging of the message in a completely fictional context. Andor explicitly addresses this. It shortens that distance to the point where it's impossible to ignore. That's why it's good! Maxwell Lord posted:It's like how Watchmen was a really great comic book but it gave a lot of people the idea that they needed to make comics more like Watchmen and that leads you to Elongated Man's wife being raped and murdered so that Batman can feel betrayed. When I say more Star Wars should be like Andor, I (and I presume many others) mean that if you're gonna do the franchise thing, the goal should be to tell new kinds of stories while using the existing IP framework as a production shortcut. Less time is spent (both audiences and production) re-inventing and explaining a new universe, more on the things that matter. Familiarity can be useful, like if you're writing a crime mystery story that requires a troubled detective you might as well just slap a variant of Holmes in there. SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 05:57
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I wish there was an easy way to aggregate all my streaming subscriptions together and just say 'show me every available movie where Roger Deakins (or whoever) was the cinematographer, starting with the earliest'. Even having to go to JustWatch is too much. Where's my future mind tv movie instant gratification service. Edit: And yes, the Blade Runner stuff made me think of this. Also, it's a good movie. SCheeseman posted:2 failed Andor pilots were made and abandoned That's the first i've heard of those, were they made with the same cast? Different producers/crew?
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Nov 9, 2022 06:54
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Magic Pus posted:‘Blade Runner 2049’ is just continuing the proud Blade Runner tradition of being grossly under appreciated upon its release. My hot (but sincere) take is that it may very well be superior to the original. I think I’d be totally rock solid in that opinion if the Jared Leto part had been played by David Bowie, as originally intended. Talk about a MAJOR downgrade… BR2049 really wants for a version of the Tyrell Gets His Gouged Out And Dies scene for Leto's character (who is still alive at the end, gently caress off)
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Nov 9, 2022 07:04
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frogbs posted:That's the first i've heard of those, were they made with the same cast? Different producers/crew? https://www.thewrap.com/andor-tony-gilroy-interview-star-wars-disney-plus/ quote:“They tried it a couple times. They tried it very admirably. When we finished ‘Rogue’ and then Kathy had the idea for doing this prequel, I thought that’s a cool idea, but the money wasn’t there,” Gilroy said. “You couldn’t really do a ‘Star Wars’ TV show. They didn’t have the money six years ago to do a show. Nobody’s doing shows like that. It just was economically unfeasible. There was no streaming. It just seemed like, ah, are you going to do some smaller version of something? It’s not a good idea.” Article has a bit more. It's all a bit vague and the pilots may never have been completed, but there was definitely production work done. Mocap and the like.
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Nov 9, 2022 07:41
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mystes posted:I thought everyone in cinema discusso loved it when it came out? I think they still do but all the Jared Leto stuff and weirdly incongruous ties to the first film fall extremely flat for me and end up making the plot a mess, whereas the first is perfectly executed It's still looks really good though
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Nov 9, 2022 08:36
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Stayne Falls posted:I'm not intending this to be a dig, but Black Lighter and OpenSourceIdiom I feel like you should both do some light Internet research on how writers in Europe reacted to the idea of the novel when it became the big thing. Your argument is starting to sound less like "Sci-Fi is for children" and more like "fiction is bad", which other posters are reacting to with derision (maybe rightly so) because that's a topic that's been recycled over and over for like hundreds of years. Hell, more like thousands - Plato was, uh, not a big fan of poets (they're liars!!!)
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Nov 9, 2022 10:44
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Andor isn’t *just* about the message either. It’s a good message and a good story, but it’s enjoyable (at least to me) because it is also in a cool sci-fi universe that gets to be explored. Only it gets to be done in less cheesy references-shoved-down-your-throat ham-written bullshit like the other series. And that lets me enjoy it more. Anyway in streaming news, AppleTV Plus is going up to $6.99/month. Just got the email.
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Nov 9, 2022 13:42
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Oh my God people stop using Twitter lol
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Nov 9, 2022 16:14
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah but you can’t just take out the Flash Gordon stuff any more than you can take out the Kurosawa influences. I’ll get around to the show but the people talking it up keep acting like it’s an inherently good thing for this goofy kid’s stuff to finally be Taken Seriously and that attitude rarely leads somewhere good. It's Flash Gordon stuff if we were in an alt-universe where there's been 30 years of Flash Gordon movies and we're currently inundated by the exciting adventures of Flash's grand kids. There's only so much you can do with that kind of stuff. Flash Gordon was awesome, but it was a one and done. Andor is finally cutting off SW from the decayed remains of nostalgia and making stuff that people who watch TV today would like. In this case a stellar quality series of movies involving heists and prison breaks.
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Nov 9, 2022 16:34
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