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Are movies better now?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Dick Whitman, Sep 1, 2011.

  1. HC

    HC Well-Known Member

    I think we get more lousy movies simply because there are so many movies made now, compared to say the 1970's. Multiplexes were extremely rare and big movies could play at the same theatre for 2 years. Now, they need to pump out product because everyone has seen a hot movie within weeks of its release.
     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I want to have a summer where the bulk of the movies aren't sequels.

    This summer was awful.
     
  3. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Still working on that professed desire to attack ideas instead of posters, I see?
     
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    You want to dredge up other posts from other threads and topics? You want to be a wiseass?

    How about all the times you gleefully chided YF, along with your idols, for not working in sports writing?

    When it turned out that ... you don't work in sports writing, either.
     
  5. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I think it was Ebert or someone that wrote a couple years ago that there are great movies being made today, but they have no audience. He used "Michael Clayton" as an example. It was a practically unnoticed nominee for Best Picture. Ebert, I believe, said that if it were out in the '50s, '60s, or '70s, it would have been a runaway box office smash.
     
  6. NoOneLikesUs

    NoOneLikesUs Active Member

    With scripted TV in a golden age, traditional filmmaking has suffered quite a bit.
     
  7. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    Here's the question I have.

    Should an old movie be discredited for not holding up over time? If it becomes dated to the current-day viewer?

    I really don't know the answer to that. But my gut feeling is that you're trying to produce great art for your current era, not the next one.

    I can remember some of the films I watched in Art of the Film class my junior year of college. I know "A Streetcar Named Desire" would be considered great today, produced exactly the way it was then, with the same players and the same cinematography. But would "Fail Safe" be considered great with a 2011 release? Would "Casablanca" be as revered?
     
  8. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    Of course this is a very American-centered question to begin with. There are good films coming out across the globe, and I'm sure many of them are from places that didn't have much of a film industry 30-40 years ago. Or at the very least they didn't have the ability to distribute them outside their countries.
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    To clarify, I don't mean complicated when I say complex. I mean building in dramatic tension and so forth. "Mean Streets" is really, really straight forward. Almost unbelievably so. It took me a few minutes into the movie before I finally realized that there wasn't a whole lot of tense conflict to worry about. Nothing to surprise me.
     
  10. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I agree with this. How many of the Best Picture winners from the 1980s and 1990s hold up today?

    Hell, Slumdog Millionaire doesn't hold up two years later.
     
  11. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    I don't know about movies, but TV is definitely better. Way, way better.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    That's for sure. Stuff that was big in the '70s and '80s is unwatchable now.
     
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