Films where I don’t recognize a single actor among the whole crew are almost always better than ones where I’ve seen such and such actor in other movies. Just more immersive. And even if they’re not the best actors I’d much prefer that over whatever the hell Chris Prat or Tom Cruise or Leo D are up to.
It's part of the blockbuster model, which does everything it can to reduce risk. Before the 70s, studios would go bust when an expensive movie flopped. Studios became very risk averse, especially for the expensive stuff. So they make a sequel to a movie that's done well, or a plot similar to that of a movie that's previously done well, based on an intellectual property that sold well in another medium(comic, book, tv-show, ...), in a genre that's previously done well with audiences, starring actors people previously liked, preferably very attractive actors so that audiences like looking at them, pushed by a saturation marketing campaign that gets as many people to watch it on the opening weekend as possible, so that if it sucks they can't tell their friends not to go and see it. It's like McDonalds. It's not the best meal you'll ever eat, but you know what you're getting, so you won't have wasted two hours or your life, or shit yourself after eating it.
Also, video killed the radio star. It's rare to be incredibly beautiful. It's rare to be incredibly talented. It's incredibly rare to be both. If you have to pick one, pick the incredibly beautiful actor, who looks good on posters and in promotional material. Acting isn't that hard. Even a pretty moron can be a passable actor.
This is basically what I told people when I started to watch some of the most amazing international and documentary cinema in the early 00s. Ciudade de Deus, La Cité d’enfants Perdus, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain, La Vita è Bella, Der Untergang, Lola Rennt, 올드 보이, Mononoke Hime, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Whale Rider. Documentaries by Adam Curtis or Errol Morris. So many people just don’t know.
True to an extent, there are a few famous actors out there who are genuinely good at taking on different roles and immersing you in the character. A great example is Jim Carrey. Obviously I know Ace Ventura and Truman Burbanks are the same person, but it doesn’t feel like that when you’re watching them. They might share similar qualities, but they’re clearly different characters.
I knew being faceblind must have some benefit. I often only realise I know an actor when I see their name in the credits. Then again it can take me half a movie to realise there are two men with dark hair, a beard and glasses, so I wouldn’t entirety recommend it.
My experience watching The Departed while almost entirely sober felt like a face blindness simulator. I was baffled when one of the characters that had been killed came back and none of the other characters acknowledged it. Cool movie but so confusing.
I'm somewhat faceblind but great at voices. There's no escape. It also totally ruins a lot of animated shows and movies because a very small number of voice actors get a majority of the work.
en again it can take me half a movie to realise there are two men with dark hair, a beard and glasses
I’m not face blind, but this is the reason I never watched another Mission Impossible movie after the first one: Every single male in that movie looked identical to me, and I couldn’t follow any of the plot line(s?), as I never knew who was doing what to whom. I can only imagine how annoying it must be when that’s the norm.
Regardless how you feel about “woke Hollywood injecting forced diversity into films,” it’s really helped the issue of telling all the good-looking white people apart.
Especially when there are a few examples of amazing actors that you can know and still sometimes struggle to recognize them in their characters. Like Gary Oldman, and … uh… OK well I’m not in a movie headspace, but he’s not the only one!
Tons of lesser names that play great side/background characters and it’s hard to tell, too, so I totally agree others need chances at lead characters.
Those are the actors I’m never tired of because their characters are almost always unique characters.
Nobody actually enjoys watching Citizen Kane. It’s the Wuthering Heights of the movie world: you get to feel pretentious and cultured for having checked it off your bucket list, but the actual experience was a total slog and you’re probably never going to re-watch/read it ever again.
Truth. Mostly its the first movie shown to media students because there is simple concepts and camera tricks there, and its always best to start with the basics.
I'm going to watch it twice now just to be that much better than most. Also I can say things like, "I personally enjoyed my second viewing much more than my first."
This is probably true of Citizen Kane. However, this isn't true of all the arty farty, black and white, older, or foreign stuff.
Some of those aren't just 'good for their time', highly rated because they were/are innovative/interesting, or because people want to be pretentious. They're still fucking good.
Eg. I watched Tokyo Story (1953) when I was in my early twenties. Tops critics lists. Seems like it's just another pretentious movie. Black and white, boring, pondorous, gave up on it. Watched it a few years later when I had a bit more life experience. Hit me like a truck. Openly wept in the movie theatre.
Sometimes if you push through, you will be rewarded.
I completely understand why people who watch Citizen Kane would find it boring. Compared to movies made in this day and age it is very boring. However, this movie was made in 1941 and was groundbreaking in many ways.
The cinematographer Greg Toland was a master who could have worked on any film he wanted. He chose to work with 25 year old first time director Orson Welles. He was tired of the Hollywood movie studio BS and saw that this kid wanted to do something revolutionary. Over 50% of the movie contains special effects most of which had never been done before. If you watch this movie next to any other movie of that era it is amazing how much different the style, camera angles, shots, etc are comparatively.
All of the American movies at the time (and this pretty much holds true even today) had someone who started with nothing and became successful or won against all odds etc. Citizen Kane flips this and takes one of the richest men in the world who starts out as the hero and turns him into the villain who ends up sad, bitter and alone. Again this is much different than other films of this era. I would argue that it is still much different to the vast majority of films today.
Charles Foster Kane is clearly supposed to be William Randolph Hearst who was the media mogul of the time. They made a movie about one of the most powerful people of that era and make him look like a sad douchey a–hole. The writer Mankiiewicz was someone who regularly attended the parties at Hearst Castle and many details in the movie are spot on about Hearst’s real life. Rosebud (Kane’s final word and the plot device for the film) is supposedly Hearst’s nickname for his wife’s private area. Hearst did everything he could to stop this movie from playing in the theaters and was pretty successful in ensuring it lost money at the box office. It wasn’t until about 10 years later when people in Europe started watching and appreciating the film that they decide to re-release it in the US. By this time Hearst was dead and there is no campaign against the movie. This is when it really gets wide recognition as a great film.
So basically a 25 year old upstart took on the most powerful media mogul of the day with a movie that had groundbreaking special effects, style, and story line. I can’t think of any film to this day that can compare to these accomplishments. Many of the worlds greatest film makers were inspired by this movie. It is for all these reasons why it is looked at as one of the best movies ever made and shown to all film students.
This is true for most “important films”. They were the first to do something well enough that the entire industry latched onto it, but their stories and presentation don’t stand well against the test of time. 2001 and Casablanca also fall into this.
That “The Man from Earth (2007)” is the best movies there is. I recommend it to people all the time but no one seems to realise how profoundly interesting it is. And it doesn’t need any scenery or special effects. It’s literally just conversation and dramatic music, tuned to perfectly tell a story that touches on many philosophical questions. I just love that film.
A lot of commenters agreeing and recommending this, so I’ll probably look it up. That said, a movie where it’s just talking with music, seems pretty obvious why most people avoid it.
Way too many good movies to have a single best, but that one is one of my favorites certainly. If I recommend it to someone I avoid any spoiling of the twist because it was so great when it happened. It might be obvious before that point for some, it came from left field for me.
And while I heard the sequel wasn't all that great, I felt that even if a sequel could be good it was totally unneeded. It'd be like trying to make a second Highlander movie, if one could even imagine that.
I agree, and i think everyone i know that has seen it does so too. You should check out the one where they hop into a tent to travel through time(primer 2004) , it has a similar ‘production value’ vs ‘delivering plot’ ratio!
Primer and The Man from Earth are two of my all time favorite films. Production value is nice and all, but an interesting idea explored well wins every time for me.
I’ve seen this movie many times and introduced many to it. It’s one of those movies that sticks with you. I think about it a lot, I find, drawing parallels to it all the time.
I’ve watched the film and it’s nothing more than okay. It’s reduced to the point of being bland. The good script can’t carry everything else that is mediocre at best.
That’s how I lived for 9 years while living alone in the suburbs and working in the city, it is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
I still pride myself on not needing a car for my commute to/from work, and I would never take my car into the city unless it was critical, I have done it a few times to learn and get experience, but it is just annoying.
For me, I use my car for recreation, I get in and drive out in the country to intresting places where I take photos of cool stuff, places that would be a nightmare to visit by public transport or walking/biking.
Who knows, in a few years I might sell my car and get in on the app leasing deal, but for now as I only got my license last year at 35, I use my own car to get experience and be a better driver, I will reevaluate the value of owning a car as time passes.
2011 Honda Fit/Jazz. That thing was like the god damn Tardis. Seats folded any which way you could think of so it could haul pretty much anything and paired with a roof rack you were invincible. It was small and nimble and was capable of anything. Snow? Sure. Camping down some semi rough tracks? Why not. Haul all your friends l? You got it boss.
I wish I still had it as I probably would have turned it into a battle car by now but sold it when I moved country’s.
Exact same for me. Bought a used 2013 Fit as my first car and just finished paying it off, this thing is a force of nature and is probably my favourite car of all time.
Small exterior, but big interior, and the manual transmission is rock solid, you definitely shouldn’t slam it into reverse while rolling forward but it’s good to know you can if you have to lol. Surprisingly good at drifting on gravel corners or through snowdrifts, and you can make it crazy far up a washed out logging road with a 14’ canoe strapped to the top. 10/10 no regrets
Extremely depressing, socially isolating, psychologically warping. I’m a responsible, intelligent, ambitious person, but I’m not a functioning human. I’m severely and permanently damaged by poverty, even though I grew up in Canada. I’m 40 but I just managed to start a career about two years ago because I’m borderline unemployable and emotionally unbalanced (I worked my ass off at careers for 20 years, and utterly failed, constant burnout and humiliation, social assistance, moving back into a parents’ tiny apartment). I work remotely which is the only way I can ever hope to maintain a steady job. I can’t maintain normal relationships because I was largely denied social interaction growing up, and my brain can’t cope with social things now. I stopped trying to force myself to learn because it was literally decades of torture that didn’t work. People keep telling me I’m autistic but all the doctors say “nope, you’re just fucked up” (actually they use words like “personality disorder” and PTSD and anxiety disorders and ADHD and other stuff. I have a long list of diagnoses for which no treatment was offered except pills which mostly don’t work, although I’ll admit that ADHD meds helped me get a bunch of work done and also straightened out my brain a little bit. I don’t take them anymore but the positive effects are still with me).
Now, it looks like I’m doing a lot of complaining here. But in truth I’m just describing my “no hope” landscape. Hope sounds like poison. I have things to do, and right now I have a pretty good life.
Yeah that sounds a lot like my current life. I’m 41, broke, can’t keep a job, socializing is painful, country upbringing. Whatever happened in my childhood did something like that to me.
But I was asking what it was like, not so much what outcomes did it have on your adult life. If it’s too painful to relive it you don’t have to, but I was curious. What was it like, when you were a kid?
We moved around a lot, almost always rural. I had a big family so they were always a close crew, but also always very strained and stressed. We had a Nintendo and bicycles. I usually had friends around until I was 11, but then we literally just moved out into the forest where there was nobody else. For 7 awful years I was like in a prison. I lost the ability to communicate, but not the desire. I dreaded the summers because I knew I wouldn’t see a single person outside my family. My parents were constantly stressed, always on a sour mood. The forest was hard on them too. I would mostly try to entertain my siblings amd read books. Depression became the biggest feature of my life. There was just nobody. Then I would go back to school in the fall and I didn’t know how to communicate anymore, and was constantly sad and lonely. But I denied those feelings because I didn’t want to be a bitch.
My very young life was awesome. Until I was maybe 7 or 8 we always had tons of family and friends around, including when we lived in rural villages. We were poor but so was everybody else. But we had to keep moving to chase work, and I always lost those relationships. And then as I described above we moved out to the absolute woods and my brain started to rot. I really have no idea what “hope” could even have looked like.
There were good times too. My siblings and I would explore the forest. We followed a river up a mountain until there was no river anymore (its weird to see it getting smaller and smaller until there’s nothing). We built sledding tracks. We found an abandoned cemetery from the 1700s just in the middle of the forest.
Mostly I just read books. And that’s still what I do.
Thank you for talking online. It might not appear to be much, but it is. You’re connecting and communicating your pain. Hopefully we merry chums can take on some of the burden you feel. Keep going; this is your one shot and it doesn’t have to be noteworthy to anyone but yourself.
The rich won’t be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It’s not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That’s capitalism. It’s about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don’t matter. The national debt doesn’t matter. Money isn’t real, it’s a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask “is this the best we can do?”
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators…
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today’s legislators, or more accurately, today’s lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they’re feasible.
Millennials grew up in the 90s, possibly one of the “best” decades in modern history: good economy, closest we’ve gotten to “world peace,” comparative political stability and “quiet” (the biggest scandal in US politics was Monica Lewinsky), and problems existed but generally seemed to be getting better with time not worse. The 90s were an optimistic time, especially considering the snowballing disaster of a 21st century that followed.
Edit: also advancements in science and technology were bright and exciting, without the constant existential dread of “what calamity have we unleashed this time?” The biggest tech/science-advancement ethical debate I remember was about cloning people, which is a genuine sci-fi-esque moral quandary but ended up being generally moot in reality.
At least where I live as a millennial you could have had a really nice childhood - until you finished school. Most struggled to find a job. Businesses would hire you as unpaid intern at best, etc. All while your parents (the boomers) expected you to have house, car and family in your twenties.
Yeah, but us millennials were only teenagers at best, toddlers at the youngest. Not really enough time to do anything with it. So while we got to experience a cool time in our youths, we had it all ripped away as soon as the .com bubble burst, and then 9/11 hit, along with other mixed events, like the Unabomber, Columbine, etc. We were also the first in line to get sent to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Gen X got to live their adult lives during the 90s and make a name for themselves.
Sure, some aspects of the 00s were shit, but that felt like a bump in the road: things were still on the up-and-up overall, and the general expectation was that we could change the future for the better, resolve the world’s issues, and live better lives than our parents. That all came crashing down sometime around 2010 with the Great Recession, failure of Occupy, and realization that Obama wasn’t the knight in shining armor we’d literally hoped for. So the difference is that Millennials remember a pre-9/11 world and the less-great-but-still-hopeful early 00s, whereas Gen Z doesn’t.
I’d say that we’re all fucked. There’s going to be at least one global population correction in the next century. Even if we are able to push it back through mitigation, new development, geoengineering, luck and pluck, the zoomers are going to see it by midlife and everyone’s life will be defined by it the way Dresden hit Kurt Vonnegut.
Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.
I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.
It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.
It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.
Satan doesn't punish. Satan's whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.
I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It's pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it's written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who's supposed to embody unpleasantness.
What’s hell all about, then? I always understood from Christian theology that it was a place controlled by Satan where Bad People are tortured for an infinite amount of time after death.
Our biggest environmental worry was landfills growing to cover the entire planet. We were all convinced this was our fate and that we had to recycle everything mainly to protect ourselves from having to live on ever-expanding waste dumps.
This is generally what I came to say, except to add that Gen Z is giving me (old millennial) some hope. We were frogs in the pot, but it's a rolling boil and zoomers like Greta, David Hogg, and the 12 year old who interrupted COP28 seem alright.
Ultimately, I'm determined to break the cycle of previous Gen calls current Gen lazy. These kids are alright and I wish we had left them better.
The Mario movie was incredibly mediocre, despite its high production value. I’m talking MCU-levels of truckloads of money spent with shockingly little to show for it.
I can’t speak to its reception with film critics, but the word of mouth opinions I heard were very positive. It was also nominated for a number of Oscars.
I made it through 5 minutes before I stopped and deleted it. Most of the time I just close the player and plan on coming back to it when my mood is different, but with Mario I felt this visceral sensation of "nope."
I don't follow advertising hype for anything because I generally despise advertising of all types, so I had no expectations for this movie. The only information I had about it beforehand was that Chris Pratt would be the voice of Mario instead of the longtime English voice actor.
One day not long ago, it was a trending torrent so I picked it up.
I guess I am very far from the target audience. Immediately the tone, pace of the editing, and the dialogue did not sit right with me. It felt like a worse version of Detective Pikachu, which I thought was average at best.
Funny you mention the MCU because the audience for those movies is practically the same. For everything I’ve read and seen it basically sounds like a animated MCU movie
When I first read this comment, I thought you were talking about Super Mario Bros (1993) and was about to throw hands. Because that movie is actually good, if deeply flawed. Its flaws make for a more entertaining movie altogether.
If you like the YouTube channel “Some More News”, you should check out their “movie”. Yes, they made a movie and yes, it’s out there at times, but the way it ties real world to the 1990s Mario Bros movie is so fragmented that when they finally connect all the dots, it’s a mind blow!
I’m still mad it basically kicked the DnD movie out of theaters. If it wasn’t for all the hype for Mario, I think the DnD movie would have done a lot better, but that’s partly their fault for choosing a terrible time to release a movie - a week or two before the biggest video game franchise of all time releases their movie.
The story feels rushed and incoherent. Characters without character and chemistry. It’s a film in which every aspect of its production was solely determined by the amount of money that was put into it. If Jack Black can’t save a mediocre film…
I am NOT going to even consider watching the new Death Stranding movie when it's out.
Just like Morbius, that movie is a "would rather ask my in-laws parenting advice than ever watch it".
I was like “this Lemmite gets it,” until I got to the Interstellar part.
But I’m glad we have common ground on the shit show that is Inception. It felt incredibly long. I don’t know if it was because I was bored, or if it’s genuinely six hours long.
All the people saying inception was actually sht made me doubt myself and go and binge all of Christopher Nolans movies again in chronological order. Maybe Im just a sucker for his film style but I still liked Inception even after all these years. The prestige was also better than I remembered it was. I also appreciated what Tenet was trying to achieve despite that movie having pretty bad reviews for a Nolan film.
I really liked Tenet’s “half of everything is moving backwards” action scenes, which I guess was the main achievement. They must’ve used a bunch of cool tricks while filming it.
I think it was also challenging to write a story that can work both forwards and backwards. I don’t think they succeeded in doing so but I’m impressed that they tried.
The Godfather, extremely overrated and very boring. Saw it many years ago, and maybe my taste in movies have changed a bit, and I consider rewatching other movies I did not like, but not that one.
Batman returns is really dumb. The movie craftsmanship (or whatever) is well done but the premise is just so stupid (to me). I feel this way about all super hero films, I just can't get past that the source is comic books for kids. I cannot take them seriously.
“Comics are for kids” is an incredibly narrow view of the comic book world. They’ve never been exclusively for kids, not even the big superhero comics. Many have diverse themes, thoughtful critiques of society, and impressively deep characters.
Completely agree and quite some of the Batman comics I have read I would not give to a child, far to much violence and quite a lot of very dark theams. Young teens are around when I would start being comfortable letting them read those and that’s still requires me to actually know them to some degree to make that judgement.
I don’t think that RSS is a reasonable alternative for social media at all. Different use case for me.
I mean, I’d use it if I had a selection of known sources that publish content regularly that I like enough of to see all the content and have a website. Only a few sources actually meet that bar for me. Then, RSS lets me put a common interface on all of them, combines a list of new content.
I use something like Reddit or the Fediverse to take advantage of people finding useful content elsewhere, which is kind of a different use case.
I mean, you’re on social media here, rather than just following an RSS feed, so presumably RSS doesn’t replace social media for you either.
I’m coming at it from the opposite side; social media isn’t a reasonable alternative to RSS, but people often use it as such. RSS is as you say, for getting updates from specific sources without being at the mercy of a third-party’s recommendation algorithm.
I don’t like Hereditary. I tried to watch it 3 times but I just can’t get through it. I think the beginning is great but I dunno, I just didn’t like it. I do love Midsommar however.
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