It's such a great service. Can't really believe it's just one person maintaining it essentially as a public service given that it's quite expensive to run (based on a post I read in the last year or two).
Basically all my techie and non-techie friends use it -- hoping that he finds a way to make it sustainable so that it sticks around! It's a much nicer experience than waybackmachine imo, at least for my use cases
Good point, didn’t think of that! Although, trust issues aside, allowing anyone with an internet connection to record what they’re seeing may help circumvent such blocks too.
I think the problem with streaming is that there is just too much of it. There is only so much content -- ahem, TV -- that people can watch in a given day. Especially because content includes stuff like TikTok.
How many minutes of TV were produced last year? How many minutes were produced in 1990?
Those legacy salaries are not possible, because if each American TV minute is worth $0.01, they're now splitting that $0.01 across 1,000 different shows, not a couple dozen.
If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face.
Like most simple answers, this is wrong. If content isn’t profitable, the networks don’t have to pay for it, which has always been the case. What is different are the mini-rooms and the excuse of streaming to stop paying residuals.
If they can’t make money without paying a living wage, then they shouldn’t make money. Period. Business models like Uber, postdoc/adjunct professorships, and Hollywood are exploitative by their nature, replacing business models that used to pay better wages for the same service.
In both the cases you mentioned -- college professors and cab drivers -- supply (of labor) massively expanded, and wages fell accordingly.
Of course, the execs are greedy, and of course they win. The execs always win.
You can look to Spotify for what happens on residuals, when an individual can choose to listen to any of 100,000,000 different songs. The only winners are those who control their own image and distribution. Like Taylor Swift, who makes 10 million each show and has full control over her recorded music.
Like startups where people will get paid with stock that may go big, acting and to some extent writing gives you a chance to become a star. But I think this is more about the median performers and whether they get paid fairly and get a share of streaming and any derived work such as AI generated likenesses/scripts.
How can you pay residuals on content that doesn't have recurring revenue? Before the playback was either tied to a sale or ads that played back against the content. Now there is no more money when someone streams it.
In other industries you only pay a person once and then that work is owned by whoever paid.
If a streamer doesn’t have recurring revenue, it will go out of business very fast.
In other industries you may be paid once, but you don’t get asked to sign away a permanent right to lose your likeness to get paid. But they might offer you stock options, which are a kind of payment based on overall performance of the product.
> If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, I can control my own creative output, make my own brand deals, and own my own face
You also lose control of your distribution and are completely commoditised. Hence why the median full-time content creator makes $20,000/year, and I don’t think that includes production costs [1].
And apparently the SAG average is $40000, without accounting for costs like union dues nor the bargaining advantage that comes with union membership.
When you look at non-union actors that drops to about $25000, and often has many costs to maintain due to the lack of protections that would come with union membership.
Seems like youtubers and the like have a darn good deal considering it includes a far higher volume of low activity/effort/quality "actors" coupled with the independence and higher rate of higher scale earnings.
Hollywood is way more top heavy , regardless of if secondary business ventures are excluded from both sides, as that likely makes yt even more fair in that more yt creators have secondary streams like merch and services than Hollywood actors do, where only the biggest names can earn much of anything by thier "brand" alone.
I have to ask, did you even try to do a comparison or did you just google internet creator average income and the presume it was a pittance compared to that of the average of all working (and non working?) actors?
(Ed: ugh just reread that and dont like _how_ it's written, but since the correct sentiments and points are there and rewriting would be an undertaking, I'm just gonna leave it. Sorry for any headaches the prose causes.)
And the content is garbage. Even if one would disagree, we are comparing with the American cinematic canon, by most measures the greatest body of artistic accomplishment humanity has ever produced. I cannot believe people even have the nerve to question the comparable value.
I mean, if you're looking at averages here, then of course the average content produced for YouTube is worse than the average Hollywood-produced movie.
But at the top end, I don't think there's a direct comparison - stuff gets made for YouTube that wouldn't get made as a movie and doesn't make sense as a movie, but it's no less valuable IMO. There is a lot less of it, and that industry has existed for less time.
Just look 3Blue1Brown's educational math videos, or Veritasium's science videos, or any of the other countless videos on various topics. Better at what they're trying to achieve than almost anything comparable that has existed before, IMO.
Even for things with more direct comparisons - take cooking YouTube vs cooking shows on TV. I believe cooking YouTube is much better in most ways.
None of your examples are even artistic expressions; they're informative content. The comparable counterparts would be television shows or documentaries, not Hollywood narrative films. Tiktok has a lot of artistic expression, but simply nowhere near the level of greatness found in the American cinematic canon, which contains by most measures the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.
> American cinematic canon, which contains by most measures the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.
I love how Americans are so high on their own exceptionalism that they come out with these kinds of statements without even realising how clueless it makes them look. Not even "some of the greatest artistic accomplishments of mankind.", but all of them, apparently.
I don't think it's valid to say that documentaries or tv shows are not artistic expressions. But yes, as I said, it is not a direct comparison to movies specifically.
The purpose of art has never been to entertain, even if art can be entertaining. The fact that so many people think such a decadent idea shows how debased our society has become by way of the profit motive.
This is an insane way to think about art. Of course art exists that entertains, and it is art. To say that art can't entertain is an absolutely drab way to look at things - it almost assumes that only negative emotions can be transferred through art.
Had any of the examples been Lessons of Darkness or Grizzly Man or Burden of Dreams, this conversation would have gone quite differently, but since none of those films were released on Youtube they were not even an option to begin with.
Genuinely American cinema always seemed like almost pure entertainment to me. There is not that much greatness or artistic accomplishment, but there seemed to be craft. I mean, there are shows that are more then that, but overall American production was rarely focused on great accomplishments beyond "make it fun and make good guys win".
Great craft cannot be delineated from great art, and neither can "genuinely American cinema" from American cinema. Was Kubrick a master of British cinema? Of course I can't really argue with your specific point, but one of the most groundbreaking things about American cinema was the sheer size of the incorporated components that made it possible. Hollywood pioneered moving Heaven and Earth for the silver screen, and it could never have happened without the brutal capitalism that only America does best. Likewise, Hollywood sold entertainment and the works of art were more often only a side effect. This has been the case for so much great art throughout human history that it's hardly an exception rather than a rule.
Kubric has great visuals and all that .. but he is not exactly engaging with ideas all that much. It is that thing about American cinematography - you see it and forget it.
Is it engaging and fun? Yep. Is the greatest artistic achievement? Not really, because they rarely even try.
Please enlighten me with some of these "idea" films you speak of. I'm not sure I am convinced that more "ideas" makes better movies. What has you so tickled? Tarkovsky? The French New Wave? German Expressionism?
I said that American cinema is not engaging with that and never engaged - with rare exceptions.
On top of head, I think that something like Shigurui or Berserk would be great examples of art that engages with ideas and complexity. So would be Umberto Eco and the Name of the Rose, more or less. Even original Witcher books have huge amount engagement with ideas despite being meant for entertainment. The movie "Come and See" managed to make war sound not fun which is something too.
American cinema is just not about that. It is not about complexity, it is about simplifying and streamlining. Which is fine, it is just odd that someone claims opposite.
The amount of drivel produced in any given era is mind-boggling. Very little of it survives even a century. Go ahead an read a non-annotated Don Quixote, and try to find all the references to the great authors of the day.
However, a lot of what we think as great art exists and survives because of gatekeepers: from rich men with enormous egos to critics mistaking their taste for objectivity to policy makers elevating some forms of art over others etc.
Most Rennaissance art is indistinguishable from TikTok. Go to a few museums and you will recognise the fads, the patterns, the techniques etc. A cross-dressing femboy doing a hundredth uwu on TikTok is no different from a Rennaisance painter doing a hundredth cherub flying over naked women in a forest.
This is not responsive to either the point I was making to the other commenter or to the response I made to the original commenter. It’s just arguing for arguing’s sake. (I recognize it, as a former lawyer. And it’s fine. But it’s just not what I spend my time on these days, so I’m not going to substantively respond, because it’s a tangential rabbit hole, and I’m too stinking hot to chase.)
That actually was responsive to the previous discussion. And we disagree so much on the idea that artistic merit or accomplishment or whatever you want to label it is indexed wholly or even in large part by amount of people who view it that there’s not much to say except just that: I disagree.
Which is not to say that I have some equally objective measure to offer you. I don’t. But then, I’m not the one who made claims about artistic accomplishment “by most measures” (whatever that even means). I simply provided an example of something that self-evidently certainly rivals “American cinema” as universally acknowledged to be profoundly artistically accomplished. Whatever the comment about dreck in every era actually proves, if you think the Renaissance was not the site of profound artistic accomplishment (hello, rediscovery of linear perspective; hello frescos; etc.) I don’t even know what to say.
[Edited to add: if artistic accomplishment is just eyeball quantity, then it will increase linearly with the increase in global population and interconnectedness as technology improves. Reducing something like artistic accomplishment to such a simple function of population size serves as the best possible reductio of that position.]
I mean… if you are comparing the last century of filmmaking versus whatever is on YouTube, sure. But if you are comparing the last few years of movies vs what’s available on YouTube, I’d much rather watch YouTube.
I grow up in the 80s and 90s. That time there had been a small set of really famous actors. Today there is an endless stream of new actors. In the end, it almost does not matter what person plays in movies today .. how many Spider Man did we have in the last 20 years.
Also movies like the newest Indiana Jones. I think there is no true background from outdoor. I guess not in a single scene. At least it feels, like they did the whole movie with animated backgrounds.
It's more often a composite of real stuff and VFX. Almost every scene in Game of Thrones was a real location with effects and edits to make it suit the scene.
> If I'm a young person who wants to perform on screen for a living, I know where I'm going: TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
An extremely sad state of affairs by any historical measure of a successful society.
Hollywood marks the absolute apex of American art. As this era of unquestionable greatness and human accomplishment draws to a close, we are nothing if not pathetic if we cannot at least acknowledge what it was. We should be nothing less than ashamed for letting it slip through our fingers, but here we are just making little quips about its outdatedness.
This would make sense if the companies in question weren’t making billions and funneling those profits to the execs, and investors, over the people who actually did the work.
Expanding or contracting the industry is one thing. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a shift in how the money is distributed due to a tech “disruption”. Workers deserve to be paid well for the content they make happen.
Bingo. Except TikTok, Insta, and YouTube are all the intermediary still. They let you build a following but a creative still needs to find a way to own direct communication with their audience.
Let us not forget that in our current trajectory, Robots and Real Estate are going to be owned by one class of people who extract value from society while everyone else struggles to feed themselves.
Can’t those platforms de monetize or hide your content or even ban you according to whatever criteria suits them? It’s great until it’s not. Shaky foundation.
I know little about the behind the scenes machinations in the US film/tv world.
The one union says they have been on strike since May.
That is, in my opinion, a long time.
Which may indicate that the other party is not hurting too much from it?
On a sidenote:
With the horrible quality of the major films and tv show these days,
these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions.
Soom seems to be
"Ok give me an explosion here"
"Move 3 steps"
"Give me an explosion there"
"You get on the motorcycle. "
"I need 3 explosions there and then you four open up with machine guns"
Some movies seem to have bypassed the script writing entirely
It's basically a blip in AV production times. Hollywood movies will typically take one or two years to be made; so you won't see the economic effects of a strike for some time. TV starts hurting faster but it also hurts less, because you have sports, news, and reruns, to pick up most of the slack.
If this was, say, a NBA strike, we'd currently be towards the end of pre-season.
Most movies seem to be "written" as a collection of scenes that the directors and producers want to see and then they tell the writers to make those fit together in a story.
> these guys should be on strike demanding higher quality productions
That is one of the goals around getting some baseline requirements around writer's rooms; they want to stop a hollowing-out race to the bottom with writing in Hollywood that has been going on for a while.
The modern songwriting process goes like this: gather multiple teams of 20-year-olds with laptops into a conference room. Give them 2 hours to write a song. Pick the best song. When I heard about this process on an NPR podcast I said yup that explains everything.
In contrast, a member of the Allman Brothers was holed up in a motel or cabin trying to write a song. In frustration with writer’s block he went out to the local store. Inside a woman was chasing her young daughter down the aisle calling her name. He liked the name and went back and wrote the song “Melissa.”
Writing a song has always been the easy part. It's all the other stuff that takes time and money. At that level, everything is a whole production. Everything. I don't see how this is any different from a writer's room for a TV show or movie. Those scripts go pretty quick, too. Maybe not 2 hours, but they have to deliver scripts in time for production to get it ready for narrow release windows.
You're always going to get a factory process when a lot of people are involved because there are deadlines and checkpoints written into contracts. That doesn't make the output bad.
Pop music was overproduced in the late 60s too. There are still plenty of bands writing songs about mundane experiences they've had after holing out in a motel or cabin for a while.
I don’t see many non superhero or non franchise movies coming out of Hollywood. It sure sounds like the moneymen’s influence: why not milk a sure thing?
Yes, there's a reason why, excuse the expression, capeshit movies have dominated the cinemas for the past 10-12 years. MCU movies probably pay for a lot of other high-quality movies - but they rely on those franchise movies to bring in the bucks.
The good thing is that most serious movie goes can easily ignore these movies, if they want to. The negative thing is that, well, those movies really do dominate they cinemas, and will get first priority on pretty much everything.
I'm from a small rural place, and back home they would screen nothing but the latest superhero movies for 3-4 weeks straight, when they got released. Other movies would either get passed on, or get screening time much later in the season. More often than not it was the former.
What that shows is your market is so small and costs have grown enough over the years that if it weren't for the addressable market of the superhero movies, they wouldn't be showing anything in your region at all.
Maybe the big chains might exit your market regardless. AMC almost went bankrupt(they were saved by meme investors). Regal did go bankrupt. Hell even Alamo went bankrupt (but emerged successfully to live another day). How much time do you think is left? As AMC continues to decline they will chop the rural areas first. You'll be maybe left with mom n pop outlets that may not be worth dealing with from the point of view of the distributors(we'll see).
Ive said it before but i'll say it again(and get downvoted again). Living in a rural region confers many benefits one of which being likely low taxes...but another way to look at it is you are still paying a tax, just in other ways.
This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson.
It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.
Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
I blame the general stagnation of our current age and its associated rent seeking on the MBA. MBAs have spent decades teaching and preaching that what the business does doesn't matter. All that matters is financial alchemy.
"Forget building a better mouse trap! Take on venture debt, buy out all the mouse trap makers in your area, make their products worse (or keep them the same and sell them under a different brand name - whatever doesn't matter anyway) and jack up the prices. What are they gonna do? Go to someone else?"
"Content business? What content business? Those old Hollywood studio executives were hacks! They still cared just a tiny bit (a vanishingly small bit) about making a 'great movie.' What phooey! Buy up licenses, sell them for as cheap as possible for a while and then flood the zone with generic content. They won't know the difference! It's all the same!"
The reality? People do care. They might like slop, but they like well produced slop. Not just any generic, store-brand slop.
No matter what the artistic merit of Friends and The Office is; hundreds of thousands to millions of people subscribed to Netflix to watch them over and over again. When those properties were gone, they slowly began to ebb away from the platform. Starting in 2019, when Netflix first lost the IP,
Their response to their decline wasn't to create better series or a better experience, but to crack down on sharing passwords. It made their subscriber numbers net positive for one or two quarters (so far), but you don't have to Fermi to predict how this will end. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755156/netflix-subscribe...
I fundamentally agree with this. When Netflix demonstrated there was value in the IPR, the IPR holders took it back to get that value themselves. Netflix had shown it could make amazingly good content, but at higher risk and cost. It's got scared of the risk side. Too many flops? cancel after 2 episodes, never mind a season. So what if "fans" are ballistically angry and unfinished story arcs, they don't pay our KPI!
But, we also have short memory for the french metric kilometres of sheer dreck put out. I mean, "b movie" exists as a term because of it. hence D list celebrities exist because b list movies exist (kinda-sorta)
"Barton Fink" tells the story well: get amazing talent, smash the joy out of their life by applying the old school hollywood machine.
Disney has got scared too. It doesn't know if it will ruin the longterm income from Star Wars, by making more star wars. Its milked its goldmine of cartoons for 5 or more decades, and has a long term view (hence the remarkably bizarre disney thing about "putting it back in the vault" for a 5-10 year window so that a whole new cohort of consumers can be made to buy it)
What always confused me about such a large number of networks/IP owners deciding to open their own streaming service was that even if every single streaming service was full of amazing content, there never was any indication that most people would want to subscribe to all of them. There's a big market for people willing to pay $15/month to get a ton of stuff to stream, but there's a lot fewer people willing to pay $75/month for five different streaming services; it doesn't matter if each of them had 20% of the "good" content from before if no one wants to pay 5x what they're already paying. Some of the wave of services coming out after Netflix's boom made sense; Disney probably has the largest set of IP of any company in the world for a streaming service, HBO already was a premium service that had demonstrated they were able to produce content people were willing to pay for but...is anyone really shocked that CNN didn't have enough draw to maintain a profitable streaming service? I suspected that the proliferation of streaming service wouldn't last forever, and that eventually there would be a consolidation into a much smaller number of major players, but I didn't think it would take so long that the people in charge would end up grinding the entire industry to a halt because they'd take so long to finally figure out that it wasn't sustainable.
Netflix's streaming never made sense to me even when they were the only game in town. I think they benefited from a halo effect from their compelling DVD mailing service which actually had a ton of great content. But eventually people figure out that the streaming service only has a few thousand movies, which means the odds of the particular movie you want to watch being offered is very low.
I used to work in a video store, and even though we had a lot of movies available, most people only wanted a relatively small number of new releases.
I really miss when Netflix DVD had a truly vast back catalog of obscure films, but I suspect a lot of them didn't circulate all that much.
With streaming, the movies that people want always seem to be available somewhere. You might have to subscribe to a half-dozen services to get all of them, or rent them a la carte. Each of those services has some back catalog as a kind of nudge to keep watching this service rather than cancel and jump to some other service while waiting for the next big movie to come out. But they don't seem to expect any individual item to get much play.
Netflix in particular seems to mostly want to cut out the middle man and produce its own content. A lot of Netflix's most popular items are their own. I'm not sure I understand the economics of that -- they're spending major-studio-money on films ($100M+) and then using it as a "loss leader" to for their all-you-can-eat service.
They didn't mind paying for google but when something better comes along for less they clearly will take that. Netflix came along and the studios sold their content to them as an extra. Now that their cable business is gone they need Netflix to make up the revenue but everyone is locked in at $20/mo
Netflix provides on demand, advertisement break, watch on any device media. Streaming is objectively a better product than linear cable or satellite TV.
>HBO already was a premium service that had demonstrated they were able to produce content people were willing to pay for but...is anyone really shocked that CNN didn't have enough draw to maintain a profitable streaming service?
To be fair to CNN, the creation of that service was a weird saga where an outgoing CEO wanted to push it front and center as a pet project and spent an enormous amount of money on it.
But then when he was forced to leave due to a scandal just as the service launched, the incoming CEO had no love for his predecessor's pet project. So he pulled the plug immediately after all the money had already been spent.
Its a textbook example of the C-suite not actually caring about the business as a whole. Maybe the product could have been successful (although it is hard to see how people would pay for a product they don't want to consume when its free), but due to circumstances unrelated to the product, it never got a fair shot.
What surprised me is the number of companies that declined free money from Netflix and decided that the cost to actually make a streaming service was negligible. They could just 2 or 3x that money in a year or two with massive subscriber numbers, because those roughly 5 shows in 40 years of back catalog were just that good.
My own experience as a child in the UK was 1 commercial, 2 state. It became 1 pure commercial, one semi commercial (C4) and 2 state before I left. I believe the UK is now up to BBC5.
The Australian experience I emerged into was 3 commercial, 2 state/semi-state (ch 7,9 10 commercial, ABC/SBS state/semi-state)
I posit, purely from interest, that in the H-H interest sense of 'monopoly' 5 independent agencies broadcasting and either taking Ad revenue or state revenue or a combination is actually pretty bloody good: they have economies of scale, and they can commit to both make shows, and screen shows.
Now, we didn't lose any of those. So 5 in OZ is joined by Foxtel, Stan, Binge, NetFlix, Disney+, HBO+, Amazon, Paramount. You might say "well from an HH index point of view, this must be better" but the experience is no: it isn't. They can't make enough ad revenue to make content, and they compete with the IPR holders for content, and the content is now more diffuse. Its actually not as "good" as old school TV.
W
I actually miss pre-streaming TV. I miss the sense of unity which came from watching the 6 or 7 o-clock news with millions of other people. Timeshifting existed in VHS days but most people didn't time-shift and couldn't binge-watch unless one of 5 broadcasters decided to binge-programme.
What we lack, and the UK has, is time-shifted. So, keep 5 (ok now 25) basic broadcasters but allow them to run their content on 3 distinct time feeds so you can "watch" things without missing them. I think THAT was smart.
TL;DR I watch some streams, but I miss 'channels' and I don't want to have to pay for bundles, or streams, as much as other people seem to want to.
What are your thoughts and experience with ads to support the channels? I'm not sure that I could go back to watching US broadcasts in real time without a DVR to skip the ~20 minutes per hour of commercials. US public television at least puts the non-content filler between shows, not in the middle.
Beautifully written: my personal feeling is that the decline in the quality of everything around our lives are strongly correlated with the increased focus on value capturing rather than value creation.
It's a weird prisoner's dilemma, since value creators will always be bled dry by value capturers, but if value creators stop existing, value capturers have no value to capture anymore. Then they start flinging crap at the wall hoping something sticks, because in their intense drive to capture value they ignored to learn how to distinguish truly valuable content.
There is plenty of blame to go around. The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same. Movies and shows seem to be eye-rollingly preachy and talk down to audiences. The whole industry is due for a sharp correction.
>The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same
I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.
Eventually the money men become so risk-averse that they give up on originality entirely. Hence the endless stream of remakes, adaptations and formulaic additions to existing series.
It is always the businesspeople at fault for it. Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work any more than software developers want to naturally build CRUD apps for ad-tech companies. The employees go where the businesspeople and their money lead because working class folks need to make a living and most Hollywood creatives are working class.
> Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
There are of course good businessperson led movies and bad businessperson led movies. The same is true for creative led movies. Maybe the "explore the liminal space of boredom" movie is bad, but that description certainly sounds more interesting than a bad version of Transformers 7 or whatever.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
> Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.
> Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness.
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
It’s normal to have creative flops too, but generally the landscape looks much better and healthier than now. And some of those dreamscape flops are likely low to mid budget or self funded projects.
How many of them have you talked to or worked with? The ones I know don't "snub their noses at the 'working class' and share none of their value of beliefs". But I have a feeling that you're not looking at the whole working class, only a subset.
Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident. It used to be, when an adaptation was bad, writers and execs would blame each other and audiences would sorta side with writers. Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema, so now writers and execs blame audiences when they fall short.
> Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident.
A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?
I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.
But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!
It wasn't the ending per se that everyone got mad about. It was how the ending was written. Silicon Valley has showed us that execution matters as much or more than ideas.
If you'd been paying attention to what the writers and actors on strike right now are saying—including some of the A-list ones who are genuinely quite rich and famous—you'd see that, at least as a class, they do not, in fact, snub their noses at the working class.
The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.
Reminds me of a movie from the 1960s, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I was watching recently.
I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution
Funny that you mention Monty Python, they almost had to cancel the production of The Life of Brian since their original financier was apprehensive about the the film's content making fun of religion.
George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.
The same was true for the holy grail too. Other financiers included (iirc) led zeppelin and other British rock greats.
The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.
The Beatles funded some very weird stuff. Ringo Starr in The Magic Christian is probably the best example, an extremely on-the-nose set of satirical sketches.
There was no one suggesting that the scene but cut, it was a clickbait-like appeal to the reactionary press to get some extra awareness of the project out there. And it worked.
It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.
Monty Python was only ever possible with something like the BBC. There's no way a commercial network would have taken a risk with it, and even more so in the USA. Its popularity in the States began underground, with PBS affiliates getting the ball rolling in the 1970s. There's no way that major networks would have run the show, even in a late-night slot.
Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.
Studios are essentially big piles of cash to fund movies; rights to scripts, stories and IPs to make movies; and contracts to distribute movies (and, since everything old is new again, they now also own streaming services rather than movie theaters). So it makes economic sense to lock down as much IP as possible that can then be used to generate an endless torrent of remakes, sequels, adaptations, secondary media, adaptations of secondary media, remakes of adaptations of secondary media, and so on; much more cost-effective than hunting for new screenplays in the slush pile, and much more comforting to the investors to see the next two years of movies on a PowerPoint slide at the shareholder meeting, even if you have no idea what those movies are beyond a title and some executive producer's vague plan.
Very often the money printing is more a function of how many eyeballs you can get your product in front of, and reducing friction of consumption to a minimum, rather than their real preferences in a flat hierarchy of all the options out there.
"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?
Sometimes it is as much because there isn't something better so people default. And there often isn't much better because it is more financially rewarding to get a “not bad” reaction from a large audience than it is to produce something that only appeals to a smaller one.
Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.
I don't think it is entirely. Even with safe and neutered, writing could have been much better then it is. The butchering that happened in Witcher or Game of Thrones was purely on writers. It is not just money men.
It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.
The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.
Yes, this exactly - the quality of writing on a lot of shows these days is absolutely abysmal. Not just dialogue, the plots - so much 'tropes copying', pointless or stupid 'reveals' or just plain dumb twists to make things edgy and exciting. I feel like the average IQ in Hollywood writing departments as dropped significantly in the last 20 years ... sad
Well, it could get a level of magnitude worse with AI. And Im not necessarily blaming AI but how the industry will recycle the successful tropes and cheap out on everything else.
One could argue that there's a selection effect during the up and coming phase that means a different subset of writers are the ones who make it to the top these days.
(I hear tell that as adaptions go The Expanse was relatively well done, though I haven't watched it myself as yet)
Another problem is that everyone is aiming for the broadest international market, so any dialog must be easily translate-able to Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, and so on. No more clever wordplay, double entendres, puns, regional dialects... It all has to be vanilla and the themes need to be simple and straightforward (not to mention politically uncontroversial) so it can be palatable across the entire globe.
I've seen Japanese subtitles before (I mean Japanese language subtitles) and almost all subtext is lost regardless. Far worse than the english subtitles on anime.
You might as well make the movie you want, the end result abroad will be bland regardless. The translation issues are just an excuse.
Agree Japanese subtitles are absolute garbage—I once made the stupid mistake of using Japanese subtitles watching a comedy on a date with someone that didn’t speak English.
However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.
Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.
Yeah Japanese sub is too much omitted. It's designed to just understand meaning quickly. People understand emotions from original actors' voice (though I doubt is it precise). Movie on theater can't be paused, so very long annotation like anime fansub isn't possible. Drama translation is done by same culture.
Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.
Can you recommend interesting "unsafe" shows that, but for the money men, you think would/could be made today? Or are being made but on smaller subsidiaries?
A lot of shows on Adult swim. I have seen many folks that have worked with the network basically say they have near 100% creative control. Mind you it is about 90% animated stuff.
You see absolutely crazy stuff like The Eric Andre show get 6 seasons. A talk show that is basically just out to torment all their guests. 'Off the air' while only a few episode every few years, is much more of an art experimenter than anything you would consider a show, it is wonderful.
Every few months there is something new and twisted that comes along, it feels like Adult swim is that TV studio that the main company complete forgot exists and that head corporate hasn't checked on since the late 90's.
But the budgets also show, there are no million dollar budgets here.
What counts as "new and twisted" these days? I guess I'm wondering what sort of thing is being held back from wide audiences because of studio money men rather than just current tastes.
The Young Pope. It is new and different. It is edgy and definitely not like other stuff these days. (The young pope, not the new pope which is the second season.) It was made in europe and couldnt be made in north america, not today.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
The older seasons of Top Gear. It was wildly popular but got its energy from an old form of "blolky" male-dominated humor that just doesnt fly these days. The Grand Tour continues but is a pale comparision of the previous energy.
Note that all of these are dominated by male protagonists, a rare thing in recent years.
> The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
Man did he flirt with the beautiful actresses he had on the show.
Two recent Criterion releases that have got criticized for colour grading were the Wong Kar-Wai boxset, and the Kieślowski “Three Colours” 4K re-release. But the Wong Kar-Wai colour grading was the director’s own choice and simply handed over to Criterion, while crew on the Kieślowski pictures claim that the 4K re-release colour grading is more faithful to the original celluloid than the earlier Blu-Ray release.
Modern film colour palettes is why when I saw That Dress breaking the internet my first thought as "you're both wrong, it's teal and orange" and -lolsob-
The problem with Criterion is that they have no idea how to catalog things or like everyone else they make a Byzantine system for good engagement/enragement.
I believe media should be arranged by at least the following categories.
Year
Studio
Director
Genre
Country of Origin
After that they can do whatever they want. I hope I"m wrong but I can't do this with iTunes, Netflix, HBO whatever, Criterion, TCM.
Criterion has newer films once they are released to the home market.
Also Criterion just edited "The French Connection" to make it more appropriate for viewers.
that has some cool animation and looks like stuff from when I was a kid or comic books, but what is "unsafe" about it? From the clips online it seems like just the sort of thing that can be made today without ruffling any feathers. Is there something controversial about it?
Indeed, it reminds me of the Witcher show, where Cavill left due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and were just using the show's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.
> due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and we're just using the how's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.
Is this concretely true, or just disinformation to put blame on writers vs. producers?
I’m not saying it’s not plausible either way, but this is a common cop out.
It's all entertainment industry gossip, but one of the writers for the Witcher show said the same thing:
> "I've been on shows — namely 'Witcher' — where some of the writers were not or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material). It's a recipe for disaster and bad morale," wrote DeMayo.
Also, this characterinzaction of the Witcher series writing is 100% correct - especially in last season. Going by the comments writer made publicly, she did not even understood events or relationships between characters in books. It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
> It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
This seems like a very common problem in modern American entertainment. I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience. Characters who should be mature adults seem like immature teenagers. Maybe the writers know how to write mature characters but think this is what audiences want... but I tend to think the writers are nepo hire hacks.
I think part of it is generating and stretching out drama to create more content. If situations were handled like sensible adults then much of the show wouldn't happen.
I don't think this is true. First, this is specifically not true about Witcher or Game of Thrones. Plenty of drama even if they all acted sensible.
Second, being fully grown adult does not have to imply perfection. Fully grown adults make bad insensible decisions all the time. They however do that differently then teenagers, for different more complex reasons.
And this is something that is super visible in Witcher. Original characters don't make sensible decisions all the time ... but they have adult psychology. Even when they are bad to each other, they still don't act like middle schoolers. They act like adults with issues. And show writing just completely stripped them off the adulthood.
That sound similar to the bad writing technique of "character X did action Y because the plot needed Y to happen somehow", which cheapens character X and makes them seem less like a real person and more like a puppet for the authors.
One of my big concerns is that people will see the lack of communication as normal acceptable behavior and emulate it, the show will either not address it or will explicitly excuse it. They’ll see the negative outcomes as incidental and faults from the other characters.
> I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience.
That’s what you get when you hire writers willing to work in mini-rooms (and not go to production): inexperienced folks still sponging off their parents.
This is an unfair comment. First, people do have to get started somewhere and early career is rarely as glamorous as late career. It’s highly possible that the only jobs in that industry for new entrants are in mini-rooms. So the choice becomes not working in one’s chosen industry at all or starting out in mini rooms — I say starting out because you’re talking about inexperienced folks. So that part of the comment isn’t really fair.
The other part of the comment that isn’t fair is the “sponging” part. Generally this implies loafing or laziness, someone taking their parents resources and being lazy with them. But we’re talking about working people who are new to their career and putting in the sweat and willing to work in mini-rooms. I don’t think using parental resources is sponging when someone is early career and trying to work hard to get ahead.
I read labster's comment as a criticism of the industry, rather than the writers.
If the pay is so bad that the job's only available to kids with rich parents, whence comes the breadth of experience needed to portray the world as it really is?
And by offering such bad pay, hasn't the industry brought this on themselves?
Those things are exactly the problem. You don’t actually gain experience without going to production, and you don’t have steady enough income to support yourself. They can work hard but never actually get ahead.
Imagine a world where all junior developers are contractors hired for a month or two. They work with more experienced senior devs to write a program together. But junior devs contracts end before the code is ever compiled or run, so they never learn anything about bugfixing or adjusting to client changes or performance with real world data. This is what working hard to get ahead looks like in Hollywood today.
They don't pay enough so people who's moral code whould have them support themselves can't participate and instead you get people who are OK with mommy and daddy paying for everything, often well into their 30's, and it shows.
If this is someone’s “moral code” then it goes against basically all of human history’s actions with the elders helping out the children until they get on their feet, and then the children supporting their parents when the parents age. Not everyone has the privilege to align with this system, but certainly aligning instead with a contrived moral code comes across more as sour grapes than any principled stand against receiving some help from one’s elders.
Majority of human history have kids being expected to contribute meaningfully much much sooner then we do know. And them being seriously mistreated if they don't. And them being expected to actively help elders by the time they are 30.
The older I get, the more I realize those supposedly "mature adults" do the exact same shit that immature teenagers do. They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
That is because you are interpreting "mature" and "immature" as terms for approval or disapproval. I am not arguing that mature adult characters should do all the supposedly rational correct decisions. I am arguing that their behavior is NOT the same as behavior of a teenager nor the behavior of 22 years old. The difference is not just in hiding something. It a lot of stuff like that for teenagers 2 months ago is long time ago while for mature adults it is yesterday. It is that mature adults form friendships differently then kids.
And good writing sees the difference. Take Breaking Bad - neither Walt nor Jessie make good decisions. But Walt is clearly mature man and Jesse is young and immature(and matures during the show). That is good writing involving mature adult, Walt, despite him making one bad and emotional decision after another. Same thing Game of Thrones in initial series - involves well written mature adults doing horrible things.
Then take writing in the Netflix Witcher (and everything that was said about it) or last Game of Thrones series. Long term friendship between mature imperfect adults is something the writer did not even understood. Complicated respectable mature women (who still have difficult personality) is changed into clingy teenager with crush. And judging from interviews, the writer just does not understand these aspects of humanity or of writing.
> They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
Do you think the writers wanted to work on an adaptation of a franchise they hated? Producers care more about targeting an existing market than taking any risks, even if the result is a mediocre show.
How many non-franchise fantasy TV writing opportunities are there? As nobody will consider trying their ideas, every job picked will likely have some compromises.
Doing bad work on less desirable projects in the hope of getting more desirable jobs is an interesting strategy. I mean this is an industry where showing everyone your work is the whole point. They can all see exactly what you wrote; it's all open-source by default.
The bottomline is that as a screenwriter you should do the absolute best work you're capable of, within the constraints of the project. If you can't do that because you aren't passionate about the franchise or whatever other bogus reason, don't take the job. You'll only hurt your own reputation.
While I agree that doing poorly is unlikely to help them long term, I also understand that the situation they're in is probably frustrating.
They've likely done several other shows where they were told that ignoring their distaste and working hard would serve them well in the future, then the only options provided were more shows where they'd have to ignore their distaste and work hard. Eventually you'll try to cram your ideas into a project you aren't terribly fond of.
To illustrate my point, while it's probably not a comprehensive list, I took a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_pro... and from what I can tell there is one fantasy show not based on an existing franchise airing after 2020. The Outpost on CW.
You're moving the goalposts. My original suggestion was that writers only work on franchises they're passionate about. And that doing good work would lead to more offers to work on such projects. Fantasy writers are also fantasy readers and viewers, which means they are surely passionate about some existing franchises and should be happy, even proud, to do new work in those universes.
No one said anything about original TV shows. 99% of screenwriters - a number I pulled out of my ass - never have one greenlit.
I did. That's what I meant by targeting existing markets over taking risks, or why I mentioned non-franchise fantasy writing opportunities, and what I assumed the person I was replying to was talking about when criticizing using The Witcher as a backdrop for their disconnected stories.
And even if we brought that number down to 95% of screenwriters, that would still provide a place for everyone to stick their own ideas in.
I disagree with most of those but even if they were true, all of those would still be the fault of the studio bosses.
Actors all look the same? You bet they do, we market tested the top five male face shapes and we make sure every actor’s face is modelled on the most popular.
Writing derivative? You bet! Our customer surveys said they love that curly haired kid from Stranger Things! That’s why he’ll be the lead character in three separate Stranger Things spin-offs.
That's not new at all. The amount of acting in any Rat Pack movie is about zero. A lot of classic black and white comedies and musicals are just actors doing vaudeville or Broadway schtick with a camera running.
It can still be fun and enjoyable, but it's not Acting.
I think Joel Kinnamen is fine in the roles he's cast in - maybe he doesn't have much range (I'm not saying he hasn't got range, just that I've not seen him in anything other than things like Altered Carbon or The Suicide Squad); I think Chris Pratt is exactly the same.
Joel does stoic tough guys with a dead-pan sense of humor extremely well and doesn't stand out as miscast in the things I see him in.
“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.
“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”
There's no reason why having the back catalogue in streaming should be different from having it in DVD .. except that streaming has opaque accounting and seemingly pays terrible residuals.
Licenses are written before the technology is invented. Originally we had radios and record players. Each new medium requires a new license due to the structure of the ownership of the content.
Publishers that own images for print can't post them on the web. The problem is the exceptional nature of the contracts. This is why things are so splintered. All the acquisitions of corporations may create even more exceptions to the licenses.
If you have an original DVD collection of The Boondocks [1] then you have the episode
Boondocks, The S03E04 The Story of Jimmy Rebel
banned after first showing on Adult Swim for excessive depictions of racism and perceived racial insensitivities over the episode's portrayal of a racist country singer named Jimmy Rebel (a parody of real-life white supremacist country singer Johnny Rebel). [2]
There are many other examples of broadcast episodes still available on DVD, BluRay, torrents, and still indexed on IMDB theTVDB etc. but not available via online streaming.
The difference is that DVD collections were mostly created by movie fans. You had a small, but loyal audience of people that would wait every Tuesday for releases similar to movie releases.
Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.
Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.
Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.
If that was true, then why are there movies/series created solely for streaming providers?
It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.
Some bought the movie, others rented the movie, and others just waited for it to show up on their cable subscription where they paid 100-150/mo for. Not it is just 20/mo and whatever the box is.
And yet, instead of making them available for streaming, in order to recoup at least some money, studios pull them from services and make them unavailable outside the US.
Thus making the only way to see something piracy, which is beyond trivial at this age and (at least to somewhat tech person) actually a better experience. All possible video, audio and subtitle formats, including fan-production are available within few clicks, no need to connect TV to internet (so it starts getting all those ads you've missed so terribly).
Makes me think - how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie? Or do they just get some bulk fees from Netflix based ie on region and duration, and nobody cares about actual view counts?
I recently tried to watch Spirited Away on Netflix. While Netflix has umpteen audio versions on mobile and desktop, it only shows 5 (Japanese, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) on Apple TV. Why?
Somehow they still let you cast from mobile to TV with all the audio versions, but I expect them to remove that ability soon.
> how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie?
The actors and writers, who may be paid residuals on a per-stream basis, do not have access to this information, and I believe this is one of the demands of the current strike.
They got it in their minds that inaudible dialogue is more realistic and therefore has more artistic integrity than actors giving proper theatrical performances. A good stage actor can 'whisper' and be clearly heard across the room, but that's not realistic and is out of style. So now they have actors actually whisper and everybody has to watch the show with subtitles on.
Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
It was an interesting experience watching David Tennant in his first season of Doctor Who and feeling like he was overacting in a way that I found got on my nerves ... right up until I remembered that most of his acting work previously had been on stage, recalibrated, and was able to enjoy his performance fine from then on.
And I thought its just my ageing coming quicker to ears than rest of the body... same here, as a non-native EN speaker I can understand every word said in person regardless of whether its US bible belt slang, cockney, some Australians or kiwis, heck even fairly well scottish/welsh/irish (but there it depends how hard they try).
But watching any US movie and I have to either turn on subtitles or blast it so loud that some action scene will probably crack speakers or the wall, since I hate getting lost in plot.
don't forget to insist on seeing Oppenheimer in a cinema with subtitles, if you plan on seeing it; it's a bit harder to find, but hopefully will send a message
I keep thinking I'm starting to go deaf. I ask my wife what that character just said, and she admits she couldn't make it out either. Then we rewind, turn the volume up, and we still can't hear what a character is saying.
Also, what happened to proper lighting? Even in a night scene, we would actually like to see what's going on, otherwise I might as well listen to a podcast drama.
Forget night scenes, what about day scenes? Regular scenes in productions today look darker than night scenes used to be a decade or two ago.
And no, this is not a technical limitation: case in point, the new Star Trek shows. We've had three of them produced in parallel, sharing some sets and props, and they go full-spectrum - from "every scene is night scene" Picard, through "everything is underlit" Discovery, to "everything is bright well-lit all the time" Strange New Worlds.
The only reasoning I can think of for making what's clearly an artistic choice is that maaaybe it looks better on actual TV. I wouldn't know, who owns a TV these days anyway? But I got one clue - rewatching parts of last season of Picard on a hotel TV, I was suddenly able to make out colors and shapes that I couldn't on a computer screen.
From what I understand, there's a current epidemic of dull flat dark lighting in movies that is motivated by SFX considerations; if you have beautiful golden god rays piercing the scene, that becomes a serious burden when it comes time to modify the clip in computers. Also dark scenes are better at hiding low quality effects from the audience.
> Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this one. There seems to be five or six "allowed looks" for each gender, and many mainstream Hollywood actors and actresses have become almost clones of those archetypes.
I thought maybe I'm just old and more familiar with actors from older generations. Show me a random famous Hollywood actor who's under 35 years old and I probably can't tell you who it is. But maybe it's because they all actually do look the same!
It's not the "allowed looks" as much as the fact that they must be all super-fit and super-beautiful, which inevitably makes it look all samey. The young Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffmann wouldn't get roles today, because they're not conventionally attractive. Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies, but he's hardly the only one doing that.
The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.
Every era has its tropes, and this one may be slightly stronger or you are just not liking it so much, thus seeing it everywhere. Look at some mainstream movies from ie 60s, all people wearing same clothes (all guys wearing suits and shirts for every single activity, surreal now yet even my own grandpa was working (biggish) garden in nicely ironed shirt and pants every day). Everybody is nicely shaven, same haircut, same... everything.
Hollywood was never about matching reality, rather just creation/working on dreams, so one shouldn't expect these things. If you complain, you basically complain about what majority wanted to see at given time, which is never fringe-pleasing experience.
> Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies
It has been years since I followed Scientology, but IIRC its beliefs see physical attractiveness and physical fitness as a sign of moral correctness, therefore anyone without it is suspect.
> Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies
Heh, this can be interpreted in two ways and I think both are true. His movies have too many attractive people (over-cast). Also none of those attractive people are very memorable because they're in Tom Cruise's shadow (overcast).
Definitely attractive, but probably too short/not built enough these days. I doubt Michael J Fox would have been a leading actor today too. Can't decide if Bruce Willis would have made the cut, but I would lean towards not. His roles went to the steroided up Rock/Vin Diesel.
It is not just US cinema though. I see the same in other countries' movie markets such as India's. Possibly just that population increase of potential actors made it more competitive, so minimum standards increased.
This is why I find it funny when certain shows manage to get through the banal filter. Bojack Horseman and The Good Place are great examples. Both basically went in with a goofy premise but then pivoted as soon as they could into some really decent stuff.
Depends what metric you use. When was the last time you saw an overweight character in a leading role? Or someone with a distinct accent (e.g. Boston accent, NY accent, southern accent)?
You can see this very clearly in US remakes of some UK stuff where they'll add a black guy or whatever and increase diversity by that metric, but typically diversity goes down by almost every other metric.
And I'm not against adding black folks, I'm just saying that the US idea of "diversity" is exceptionally narrow, one-dimensional, and overall quite un-diverse.
That's what you get when its not organic diversity reflecting reality but a forced one, by corporate order #123 to 'be diverse or forget grammy' or whatever triggered this self-censoring direction of past decade.
Sad part happens due to rise of situations where certain art (and I still call much of Hollywood product an art, just like white triangle on white canvas can be called one) can't be produced anymore. Think about ie Tropical Thunder, even Downey jr admitted it would be impossible to do such project only a decade later due to exactly this. I guess the conservatives again won, even if within diversity movement.
I recall vividly, when doing Aconcagua trip few years ago, one team member was a 2nd or 3rd generation taiwanese immigrant lady from New York. She was so pissed off how diversity movements in US are actually racist towards any other than black race, specifically her own. Try to say anything, ask anything, and you are immediately labeled as another racist, no discussion, no understanding.
I guess we all get why its wrong and then somehow on our own come up with ways to adhere to it, and sometimes some folks overdo it just to not be seen as not caring enough. Western Europe is same scheize, especially it seems English folks tend to go that extra mile in this without any actual need for it. Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here).
> Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here)
Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of unexamined prejudice in the Balkans.
Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned with the woke ideology, you don't make movies interesting, you make them shallow and sometimes even loathsome.
But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.
I hear a lot of complaining about "woke content" and I think the real problem is shitty writing. There was plenty of "woke" messaging in movies and TV shows in the 90s (just look at Star Trek TNG), but the writers has the good sense to provide a layer of abstraction through allegory or metaphor.
Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview.
It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.
> Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering.
Yes. It's just not very well thought out. And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Doing "wokeness" by box-ticking also has counterproductive effects when writers try to get too many things into one film, resulting in lots of one-dimensional characters. It works a lot better when the diversity originates from somewhere slightly outside the system but intrinsic to the film, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
> And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Or worse, confuse the character as-written with the actor performing that role. I'm sure this happened before the internet, but people couldn't reach out and send vitriol towards the actor quite as easily. I still remember when Anna Gunn got a bunch of hate mail for "being mean to Walt". It's a miracle that good movies/TV shows still manage to get made in this environment.
Colossal losses of Disney due to "rethinking" of classical plots in a "new ideology" way. People just don't want to watch it. But for some reason it's not possible for Disney to avoid it and continue making movies in a way that was mainstream maybe 20-30 years ago.
Disney profits have been strong and generally upward or steady from 2010 through to present with the sole exception of a massive hit to their Park revenue segment ( early 2020 - third quarter 2021 )
Disney's accountants have very powerful magic, but the fact remains that Disney is trashing all the Lucasfilms IP at an alarming rate. Lots of cancelled sequels, projects on hold, and the movies that do get released get lukewarm receptions from lifelong fanboys who should have been ecstatic for it.
You're not going to see me defending Lucas's slop, but I think the fanboys have a lot more goodwill for even the worst aspects of the prequel trilogy than they have for Disney right now.
I won't defend either nor step on the judgement of the true fans, etc.
However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment:
Colossal losses of Disney ...
You mentioned Rian Johnson and his work on Part two of trilogy ?? (I honestly don't bother with anything past the original version of the first film) Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia).
Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
I think this kind of analysis basically exemplifies the MBA disease Hollywood has. They think that as long as they can show a profit, things are going fine. But in the meantime fans are catching on and goodwill is being burnt. The fanboys become less fanatical and the performance of future movies begins to suffer.
The thing Disney added to the mix is massive overexposure. Getting 3 movies every 20 years, even if they're bad, doesn't instill a sense of fatigue like an annual release schedule and several continuously running TV shows do. I have a hard time understanding people who are still excited for this stuff. Even if something looks promising it's just item n+1 in an endless conveyor belt of content.
Disney losses are because of other factors, like a whole world of new content being available... including engaging video games in all platforms and all phone apps and content and remember that any and all entertainment content competes with them.
The entire history of art relies on rethinking of classical plots in new ideology.
I don't think Disney can seriously blame competition from video games when they hire a notorious "mystery box" writer to write/direct the first movie of a new trilogy for their most valuable IP, and predictably he sets up ticking time-bombs of unsolvable mysteries that future writers/directors don't know what the hell to do with.
People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
Recent flops: nearly all new star wars content, Indiana Jones, buzz lifhtyear, Thor love and thunder, Ant-Man quantumania. All should have been hits. People did not want to watch new content. Why? You mostly anwered in comments. Most of you complain that writing is bad, and I believe this majority. That would also mean that critical drinker and nerdeotic are correct in their analysis. I think it all comes to inflation of woke. Woke is the goal, nothing else really matters. The movies become predictable. Fame character cannot loose a fight. It is a checklist driven scenarios, where you have tick all the same boxes. You cannot depict unlikeable bad gay person. There were in history movies about racism, gender, but they were not preachy. They were discussing the issue. That's the difference.
Why? Is it not possible the proportion of the population that wants to watch movies (especially non novel ones) in movie theaters is trending lower and lower?
Based on the fact that the examples you listed are all sequels, the quality of the content is also suffering, but it is very possible that even if it was not suffering, the demand would be lower.
There's a fair chunk of content out there these days that's thunkingly woke in a way that annoys the crap out of me - stuff that might as well end with an "and the moral of the story is" segment ala moralising kids TV.
Stuff with a wider range of actual three dimensional characters that aren't all the usual Straight White Person fare is fantastic, but not everything with non-white or non-straight people is actually any good.
The example I always come back to of doing it right is Russell T. Davies' Queer As Folk, where the characters all felt -real-, I could imagine running into them on a night out down Canal Street and sharing a natter outside a club over a cigarette - and found myself rooting for them to be happy -because- they came across as real flawed people rather than Avatars of Representation.
One drama series that does this very well is the Lincoln Lawyer. Everyone there is a character with personality, motivation. All of those are, at least to me, rooted in who / what they are: lawyer, criminal, LGBTQ, people of color... And nobody is without flaws.
Grey's Anatomy on the other hand... well it was great early on, had some up and downs, hit a rock during amd just before Covid, then recovered is now a little bit too on the nose regarding certain issues. Yes, send a pro-Choice message. Yes, highlight the hard reality of strict anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws. Or racism, or the obesity pandemic. But please, don't turn it into a lecture, entertainment is not the right format for the that. A lecture is.
I'm not sure what you're referring to for Disney. Bud Light in particular hardly did anything in the first place, a microscopic marketing deal with one trans influencer, and they tossed Mulvaney overboard almost immediately, to no avail. Target was doing more or less the same Pride stuff they've been doing for a long time, though some widely-spread misinformation has muddied the waters there. I'm pretty sure I have a solid handle on who's responding to "manufactured outrage" in these situations.
A cursory google of “target guillotine” reveals a shirt that was never even sold at Target, but was a past creation of a designer that later designed some Target products. Devious “promotion of violence” on Target’s part.
This strikes me as a meagre attempt to post-hoc justify the outrage after the viral story that triggered the initial moral panic (targeting “tuck-friendly” swimsuits at children) turned out to be completely fabricated.
It’s outrage laundering - you have a story that could outrage a neutral observer but it’s predicated on bullshit. So in order to make keep the outrage alive its proponents need to fill the air with more bullshit that takes more time to debunk than it does to spew.
> In actuality, the reverse is true — Disney, Target, and Bud Light being examples of where catering to that mythical minority power cratered a company.
Oh yeah because Disney lost all its money and went out of business because they decided to have some black and gay characters.
Actually no, the right-wing snowflakes lost their tiny fragile little minds because there was a gay black person in a film instead of someone straight out of 1950s propaganda.
Slavery abolition is a progressive position, and in the Civil War era the Republican party was the more progressive party. In the 20th century there was an ideological shift in the Democratic and Republican parties.
It's pretty clear that the modern Democratic party was the one pushing for civil rights.
"The transition into today's Democratic Party was cemented in 1948, when Harry Truman introduced a pro-civil rights platform and, in response, many Democrats walked out and formed the Dixiecrats. Most rejoined the Democrats over the next decade, but in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement had also deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, and Republican politicians developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. These approaches are known as the Southern strategy. Anti-civil rights members left the Democratic Party in droves, and Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats' presidential candidate from 1948, joined the Republican Party." [1]
Also, look at a map of the Confederate states. Look at a map today. Why are they mostly red states today? The people/families that lived there then mostly stayed, except for the millions of African Americans that migrated to the north.
The modern Democratic Party is outraged that the US Supreme Court told them this month that “there’s too many Asians!” isn’t a legal basis to engage in systemic racism at universities like Harvard and UNC.
Multiple Democrat politicians publicly have condemned that victory for civil rights — because their platform is rebuilding institutional racism.
I don’t know how twisted up you have to be to think the same party that founded the KKK, implemented Jim Crow, implemented racial quotas, and implemented systemic racism against Asians is somehow the one fighting for civil rights — but it’s factually untrue.
Democrats right now, today, are fighting to rebuild organized racism.
Weird then that the major wins of the Civil Rights Era like the Voting Rights Act are being attacked by GOP state legislatures and dismantled by Supreme Court Justices that were appointed by GOP presidents.
Yes, the people who had the affiliation "Democrat" in the 50s and 60s were the most visible drivers of segregationist policies. So what?
Even if you were to conclude that right wing activism was motivated by protecting asian enrollees and was a continuation of the project from the Civil Rights Movement (which I don't, considering the arguments made in Fisher and the fact that conservatives opposed the provably race-neutral merit lottery proposal for TJHSST), you still need to contend with the very real fact that the specific legislation passed in that time period is being attacked and dismantled by one party.
And add to this the fact that the GOP voted for a man whose primary campaign message included policies explicitly denying basic human rights (travel) to an entire religion.
Shelby County v Holder is a good example of dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.
I also referenced the specific merit lottery policy for TJHSST.
The actual ban that eventually stuck was not his first attempt and it was not nearly as strong as the campaign promise, which is what drove people to the polls. Trump was very clear.
According to [1], they made $82.7B in 2022, up from $67.4B in 2021, for a profit of $3.1B. Also looks like they have ~$100B in assets. Pretty sure they're doing ok.
No you are not. Disney isn't broke and invoking southern democrats of the 50s and the kkk to score a point against the democrats of today betrays ignorance of history from your side.
Not to defend the troll you're arguing with, but conservatives moved to the GOP early to mid 1900s. Look up Strom Thurman for example. Reagan was another of many.
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Occasionally there is a good show. More often than not on AppleTV or Amazon (entities with more money than God) these days and more often than not completely overlooked.
> To YOU because you are probably a middle-aged man who is not supposed to have time to watch everything so that all the tropes are familiar to you. Watch less media, focus on other things.
Then why is it that when I watch older movies I haven't seen before, they seem fresh to me? Maybe the problem is the writers today think as you do, and have contempt for media-literate people who aren't totally naive to tropes.
It might be just be a zeitgeist thing. To me, all movies from the 70ies feel the same. They are distinct from movies from the 2010s (which are all similar to each other), bit are all similar to each other.
Alien vs The Andromeda Strain vs Taking of Pelham One Two Three vs The Godfather vs American Graffiti vs Animal House vs Apocalypse Now vs Tora! Tora! Tora!
Honestly I don't see much connecting "70s-ness" thread between these. You can kind of take a guess at the era by the color tones, or for those movies with a contemporary setting, the style of clothing and cars. But otherwise there is huge range in old movies.
I've got this theory that although technology advances and social mores change with different social standards being imposed on art (e.g. Hayes Code), artistic merit is more or less evenly distributed through time. That is to say, old things are about as likely to be meritorious as new things, there's no general trend of newer = better. However the general public realizing this would be bad for business, new productions don't want to compete with the best of old generations, and so there are efforts to persuade people that old content is unwatchable and a waste of time to even consider. People are strongly encouraged to favor new content over old, for instance by having an averse "eww icky" reaction to black and white movies or even technicolor. Technical developments in film stock, SFX, etc are touted as being extremely meritorious and are heavily emphasized in the promotion of new movies because this is the competitive edge for modern productions.
Previous shows were discussing complex issues. Current shows make a speech for a toddler. They say you are oppressing people. They say you are at fault. They tell but not show, which is against the writing motto. It is like propaganda nowdays. Now it is all about divisions, race, gender.
I think that it is just what you consume. There's so much content produced and you apparently only consume things that back up your preconceived notions.
Ad preaching - there is engaging with the thing and there is preaching the thing. Like, yeah, majority of the complains about "diversity" is rooted in sexism, racism or homophobia and it is not even hidden.
But then I have characters having mini speech about female equality or power, in a weird situation, while the very same character is not even written to be competent adult woman. That is preaching. They could write competent medieval woman or gay, acting capable and mature within the context they are in. But instead, they make them stereotype and then slap a speech on it.
Like, yeah, quite a lot of what people call "neutral past" was conservative preaching and not even hidden. But like, the preaching currently absolutely does happen.
> They could write competent medieval woman or gay, acting capable and mature within the context they are in.
Umberto Eco somehow made William of Baskerville, a 14th century christian monk, present enlightenment ideas and values in a way that seems consistent and convincing. But of course most Hollywood writers can't hold a candle to Umberto Eco. From hack writers, such things come out hamfisted.
They can have as many gay characters as they want in any movie and it wouldn’t matter. Hell it probably wouldn’t even come up. But once it becomes the characters ENTIRE identity and only character trait, it does seem a bit preachy.
> The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
If people will still pay, you would of course cut quality to increase margins. Walmart figured out that quality was a secondary concern to the customer, who is quite happy to buy a lawnmower that starts twice for $90 over one that lasts years for $180.
They're not happy about it. I think a lot of people make that decision under a form of (personal financial) duress. Or put better than I could, by the master of pithy observations:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
I don't think it's even that. Everyone has been burned by companies that charge for quality and provide less service than the cheapest option. See fast fashion. See Amazon scam reviews. My parents just had a window break- a skylight spontaneously shattered and got glass all over their kitchen. The warranty, a 20 year affair, had specific provisions for "spontaneous shattering" that covered the only way windows fail- and specially disclaimed the important selling point of safety glass, that it doesn't shatter into pieces that get everywhere - safety glass is supposed to stay in one piece, even when it spontaneously shatters. A crumply singular piece is far safer than being showered with shards of glass. Thank goodness nobody was home.
Fraud is the fastest growing sector in America, and until there are daily executions for fraud, we will not be getting better.
Safety glass just means the glass has added safety features - these can be of different types.
Laminated glass is a common one, with multiple layers of glass bonded together. If the glass is broken, the bonding material will (should) hold the glass together. This is presumably what the OP's glass was meant to be. This is common for skylights and automotive windshields.
Another type is toughened glass where the glass is treated (toughened) so that when it breaks it crumbles into small granular chunks that aren't sharp or dangerous in the way glass shards are. This is presumably what you were thinking about, and might have been what OP had installed based on their description of the failure. This is common in the passenger windows of cars.
It's common after an accident to see a broken but intact windshield (laminated glass) and other windows to be completely missing as they fragmented into small chunks (toughened).
There is also wire mesh glass, that you've probably seen in more industrial and commercial settings that is a lot more fire resistant than plain glass.
Depends on the glass and failure modes. On a car at highway collision speed? Sure, it's gonna crumble into lumps. In a house window? It'd damn better stay in one piece. Except... when it doesn't.
But what is the cost of happiness to the corporation? If you buy the $90 mower for which Walmart takes a cut of, and are unhappy about it, vs being happy about buying a $180 mower, if Walmart is making more money on the $90 mower, your happiness is irrelevant to the corporation. We see corporations where that's what makes their whole business model work. Spirit Airlines, Comcast, AT&T.
There, I said it. If Spirit Airlines didn't take advantage of people putting up with being miserable, they would not be viable as a business.
I bet the people that can only afford to fly Spirit are happy once they get to that exotic, faraway place that they couldn't otherwise afford to travel to. We'd all love to fly first class everywhere if we could.
(The drip pricing is a problem and probably needs some tegation or something, and more gates, noreairports, and more route competition. But that is a aseparate issue than deep budget airlines, which you see even in highly competitive markets.)
it's just wrong though, the reason why people are rich is that they have more income streams by producing more valuable things, not consuming less.
It's a nice idiom to have when you use labour to trade for income and your income doesn't increase by your efforts but the reason why people are rich is more based on their production than their consumption.
The analogy makes sense for middle class folk though, but a rich person will stay rich regardless of what they buy as long as their production output is stil desirable.
Is it really fair to say the rich “produce” anything? Having multiple income streams doesn’t at all imply you produce anything whatsoever - some people are born into money, some earned it in the past, every now and again someone wins the lottery.
I’m not saying the wealthy never make anything of value, but rather that wealth is not necessarily correlated to “output” of any kind.
having multiple income streams means you've (the you here is broad, could mean your company, your family trust etc) produced something people find valuable yeah. Producing can mean many things here - like a podcast episode is a "production", a youtube video is a production etc.
I don't dispute that many people are born into wealth, but over the past 20 years there has been more wealth produced in the world than ever before. There are more millionnaires and billionnaires than ever before, most of them were not born rich.
You don't become rich by reducing your expenses, you become rich by making something people want and monetizing it.
The family trust example is a good one, I think - because I think it illustrates my point rather well! What does the family trust “produce”?
We can say it allocates capital to other people who then produce things; and so they “produce” at a distance. I think a better description of that is “control” (or “influence” if you are feeling more charitable). They control what value is produced by others, through the trust.
Does the trust really create anything useful on their own, though? Is there value inherent in their control/influence? Is that an optimal way of allocating resources?
Personally, I don’t think so - I think it’s inefficient, and mostly serves as a way for the wealthy to extract rent (so to speak) from society.
I will admit that this is the only world I have ever known, so it’s hard for me to envision an alternate future. But, I don’t think that means what we have today is really a good idea - and I think recognizing who actually produces “value” in society is an important realization to have.
Who knows. The problem is that optimal resource allocation is not an objective concept. You make the argument that the family trust is dead weight, but I would disagree because someone has to do the allocation, and that is real work. Most of that work is done by analysts hired by the family office, and they would just be doing that work for another employer otherwise.
You could also make an argument that the person who has inherited and doesn't have to do any work is economic dead weight. And on that point I would agree with you. But the truth is that the number of people who inherit enough money to never work is vanishingly small. Top 1% in the US is net worth $10 million, and even that is only barely enough after estate tax if they have 1 child. Top 0.1% is 50 million, and that would do it for sure. So we may be losing 0.1 - 1 % of our potential economic productivity to this dead weight, but that's insignificant. And in reality, the people I know from school from families like that are all working anyway. Most rich parents don't want to support dead weight kids even if they can easily afford it.
You're right that the system we have is inefficient and most of it is not suited towards good allocation.
The family trust having that wealth has to have come from somewhere in the first place though - someone (probably you or your ancestor) has to have made something that people wanted and were willing to pay for (obviously this is in general terms, there are exceptions in unethical stuff like stealing etc)
I broadly agree with your critique of the current system we have - which is why sensible social safety nets should be established and a government should exist as a safeguard and as a check on it.
However, production is entirely different to distribution and we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about how an individual becomes and stays rich, you're talking about the system - I agree with the critiques of the system as a whole.
People get rich by creating something people want. It is not by buying higher quality products or w/e the quote implies. You can buy all the crappy products you want and still be rich as long as whatever you're producing is in demand.
> having multiple income streams means you've (the you here is broad, could mean your company, your family trust etc) produced something people find valuable yeah
Oh, dear. I can tell from reading your comments that it’s not gonna matter to try to argue with you, so I’ll just say that this is incredibly deeply profoundly naïve.
The point is that it’s incredibly deeply profoundly naive. It’s not an insult. It’s odd that you took it as one, since it wasn’t even directed at you. But hey, you seem to have gotten some satisfaction out of whatever that puffery immediately above was, so I’m glad I could help you get that off your chest.
> It’s not an insult. It’s odd that you took it as one
I don’t find that odd. Even if accurate, “naive” tends to have more negative connotations and typically codes as an insult.
I tend to find other ways to communicate that same information to someone when needed, even if it is less direct or less accurate: it ends up being better received. The communication winds up more successful overall.
That’s not the point. The point is that at some point there’s a quality quantum jump. If you can’t afford it, you’re always paying more. It's the same thing about buying in bulk. Yes, buying cereal from the warehouse club is cheaper per unit, but you have to be able to afford the 10 pounds of cereal, and the membership fee, and afford a place where you can store the 10 pounds. If you can’t, you’re stuck paying more per unit.
Or let’s take predatory check cashing places. No one should be lose 3% to 7% of their wages to literally cash a check, yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?), so you lose 3% of your wages as a poor tax, whereas someone with a more lucrative job, keeps all of their take home pay.
FYI, the boxes of cereal at Costco weigh much less than 10 pounds, and are basically just two bags of cereal sold in a box at a grocery store put into one box, it is not onerous to buy or store assuming you have a car to transport it.
>yet if you can’t carry the minimum savings amount, you can’t get a bank that won’t charge you a monthly “maintenance fee” (lol, like what “maintenance”are they doing? Polishing coins, and ironing bills?),
Yes, operating a physical building, employing people, taking on liability all costs money. The US government could do its job and offer people free money transfer services if it wanted to ensure everyone had access to electronic money accounts. I do not see why one would expect a non charity to take up this responsibility.
IME Costco at least is not price competitive with typical grocery store private labels brands. Better quality? Sure, maybe, but they really don't compete at the "bagged discount cereal" price level AFAICT. In general Costco is usually 60% - 100% more expensive than my local HEB's HCF products.
Maybe our Warehouse Stores are run very differently? Not sure. Been awhile since I've gone to Sam's, maybe they compete in that price range.
And I just checked Chase, they charge $12 / month* for basic checking. (*Waived with just $500/month direct deposit, but let's ignore that.) If you're cashing more than $400/month, you should just sign up for it. ($400/month is deep, deep poverty level, like panhandling.) I'm sure there's people who don't get a real checking account and could benefit from it, but the reasons are probably more along thines of "ineligible to get a bank account" or math illiterate, not "too poor for the minimum balance requirements".
The whole idea is just ridiculous. The main consumer good people get screwed over like this is housing, but that's 60% screwing over the other 40%, not the top 1% vs the 99%, so most people don't see themselves in those terms.
You would have to compare prices for Costco's Kirkland brand to HEB's proprietary brand. Also, Costco's goal is not to be the lowest price. Their goal is to be the lowest price relative to the quality, and their claim is they do the due diligence of providing a minimum level of quality for their products such that the customer will be more likely to be satisfied with the product than at other stores.
Awfully convenient that their due diligence results in everyone spending a lot more money!
Seriously though I have no problem with them setting a minimum quality bar, but the idea that poor people would be rich but for their ability to shop at Costco is just wrong.
The reason people are still rich is the same reason nobody would watch sports if they didn’t reset the score at the end of each game.
“Today the New York Yankees will play the Montreal Expos. Our game begins with the Yankees having a score of 79,613 runs and the Expos having a score of 12,177 runs.”
If this is how baseball worked how much energy do you think the Yankees would spend recruiting a hot new pitcher versus starting one of the owners kids?
I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well.
This phenomenon happens even in simpler models, where it's easy to see that the eventual "winner" is only there through pure long-term luck, with zero distinguishing merit or intelligence etc.:
> If you simulate this economy, a variant of the yard sale model, you will get a remarkable result: after a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an “oligarch” holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing.
> It does not matter how much wealth people started with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease.
> I'd like to add that those teams could have always been playing equally-well.
Depending on how you count things, the Yankees were founded in either 1901 or 1903, while the Expos were created in the 1968 baseball expansion and started playing in 1969.
Without reseting the score for every game, there is simply no way for the Expos (now called the Washington Nationals) to ever have equality with the Yankees. (well, ok, it is possible but is just plain never going to happen).
At the end of the last (American) football season, the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears, and in doing so passed the Bears for the most all-time wins in professional (American) football, which is the first time ever that the Bears did not have the most all-time wins. The Bears are one of the founding teams, and the Packers joined the league in the second season. If the Bears and Packers both won 0 games for 4 straight years, the New York Giants would catch up with both of them. But only if they won all 16 games every year. Then again, the Giants joined the league in its 5th year. Is there any reasonable situation in which a non-first-decade team manages to catch up? No: it would take a generation of spectacularly bad performance by all the old clubs while at the same time a newer club needs to be spectacularly good the entire time!
I'm ideologically predisposed against centralization (including that of government), but I've still got to acknowledge the extreme slashing of tax rates that took place over the last several decades. Not only the income tax, but also the estate tax. Take a look back at the historical rates for both, and they're shocking compared to what we consider "high taxes" today.
These taxes were gutted under a pretend banner of limiting government, while government spending continued full steam ahead - including spending on mega subsidies to the financial industry by the federal reserve. Those taxes were all money that used to be recaptured by the government, now continually accumulating in private hands. The only reason we haven't had massive price inflation over the past several decades is that technological progress and outsourcing has made manufactured goods continually less expensive to produce. Instead the inflation has shown up in the "everything bubble", with asset prices mostly exempt from CPI, as ever-growing anti-productive wealth pools bid up ownership of our entire society.
Kids of the rich don't need to produce anything. Very often, they inherit the sense of entitlement to the riches, and none of the desire to create anything. At best, they are immersed in the lazy loop of self-gratification; at worst they are scheming how to destroy things and grab as much as possible from the ruins.
That was meant to be funny thought process of a simple man (Vimes). That was not supposed to be everything explaining economical analyses.
In those book, Vimes is practical simple man with little time for big picture side of things. He deals with what is immediately around him and never really cares about root causes or anything like that.
Bad example. That $90 mower works as well as a $600 Honda, it just has fewer fancy features.
Walmart is the master of the commodity. It’s dumb not to buy many things there. Whole Foods will sell you a gallon of vinegar for $7, Walmart will same the same product probably made at the same place for $2.50.
There's a ton of both. And there's a consumer problem where it's slow and painful and most importantly - expensive in the most valuable commodity, time, to do the research on products.
America is built on the assumption that people have agency to make choices. We have been robbed of that time and agency by the deluge of things competing for our attention, but also by the amount of things that we need to think about. There should be economies of scale - it shouldn't matter which toothpaste you buy, because journalism should keep them honest, but it doesn't because there's too many options for that and they're all corrupt.
Even if you could you'd probably have to fix it yourself, because the guy in town who used to run a general repair shop retired/died from old age 10 years ago and never managed to find a young guy to take over the business. I knew a guy who used to repair anything from work boots to sewing machines to televisions, but he gave it up in his 80s with nobody to replace him. I've heard this is very common, those kind of handyman repair shops mostly don't exist anymore.
For the engine, sure. It’s all made by like 2 companies.
I use a Murray lawn mower that my dad bought for $40 in 1995 at Walmart.
The evil of Walmart isn’t the products, it’s their predatory destruction of competition in rural areas. Once you hit the suburbs, they lose that power.
>I’m engaging based purely on economic decision making.
Unfortunately the environmental cost of producing disposable junk continues to be externalized and not factored into the economic decision-making spreadsheet.
The EU is working on legislation to take the full product life cycle cost in to account when importing products. It means taking in to account the cost of disposal or recycling in import duties. Which seems fair. I mean why do I have to pay for the disposal of someone's 90 Euro lawn mower?
Aside from environmental cost this is clearly also intended to reduce reliance on low-labour cost countries. Since these usually tend to have regimes which might not "philosophically fully align with ours".
Western countries went to China and started selling opium. China went to the west and started selling low quality cheap stuff. I think the later might even be more addictive then the former...
I've heard these critiques since the '90s at least. I'm sure there were plenty even during times that are now regarded as a golden age of artsy moviemaking, like the '70s.
The reality is simply that the sector rides waves, and at some point the wave ends. VHS was a wave. DVD was a wave. Mega-CGI (from The Matrix to Lord of the Rings to Marvel) was a wave. Streaming was a wave (Netflix threw money at productions almost senselessly, for a few years). Now that those waves are over, bosses' largesse is in scarce supply. Unions will do what unions are supposed to do.
The only novel bit, in this dispute, is the role of AI and computer-generated characters; but tbh we could see this development coming for a long time. A simple example: the brother of Spider-Man 2099, in the comic, is a film director who makes movies completely on his own, via digital means. This was published 25 years ago.
You've spent the last 5 years making clickbait assembly line garbage and anytime anyone has any valid criticism they are labeled ism. It's not surprising that most people have moved on. The customer isn't always right, but at the very least the customer deserves respect.
You need our money more than we need to give it to you.
I saw an interesting thought, that the recent popularity of anime among Americans is because our entertainment now is not only constantly moralizing, but also poorly made. Anime doesn’t appeal to me but I thought that was a funny idea.
Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time, and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to.
I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this.
There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth."
>...been that way for several decades, not just 'now'.
Yes, yes, but they've forgotten a key truth that used to be understood. People like to be moralized to. Persuasive speech is interesting to people because done well it evokes a response on an intellectual and emotional level. Moralizing is not the problem.
The problem is that if you're going to preach at people you need to make it entertaining preaching or people aren't going to stand for it, never mind pay for the privilege.
The strike will break Hollywood. There are simply too many other options available. Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences, which is little different from living in a foreign country and having mostly American productions marketed to you. Consumers will pick and choose between what's still available on streaming distributors, YouTube, and other non-video entertainment sources like video games.
The cost of an average blockbuster production, compared to the cost of independent productions on platforms like YouTube, is insane. There's a reason why the cost of seeing a movie in a theater is so much higher today. But the value proposition is profoundly difficult. Spend $20/person/night at a movie theater, or $12/month for ad-free YouTube, where the production values of the top content producers have increased as per-episode views have reached into the millions? YouTube democratized content production, and gave anybody with sufficient talent access to the video entertainment market without needing to deal with the Hollywood gatekeepers. Think that the talent behind YouTube productions are going to unionize? That genie is out of the lamp.
Once the consumers leave Hollywood, good luck to Hollywood trying to get them back. And because the union's agreement doesn't extend to foreign productions, good luck trying to prevent actors and screenwriters from going abroad, whether to be part of a foreign production or an American production for YouTube, the longer the strike goes on.
I am skeptical about this take. I have lived abroad before and experienced the phenomenon of having the majority of pop culture come from the US. I don't think the United States will support this model (ie majority of pop culture coming from other countries). My feeling is that, at best, the strike will give more exposure to the entertainment industry of more countries but this will in no way supplant Hollywood.
As for Youtube, TikTok, etc, I believe these address a completely different need of the consumers. It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work). Also, I (and I presume most other people) don't want to watch a 2 hour epic on my phone or laptop. The movie product includes the experience of going out, having a communal experience, etc. It is not just a solitary experience of seeing people act stuff on a screen.
> The movie product includes the experience of going out, having a communal experience, etc. It is not just a solitary experience of seeing people act stuff on a screen.
I actually agree with you, but as the price of movie tickets keeps going up, so does the cost of that communal experience. The price is starting to creep up against live concerts and live sports (for bleacher seats, OK, but still).
> It takes Hollywood to create a Mission Impossible (or even Everything Everywhere All At Once). No one is going to create something like that and release it on social media (the economics don't work).
The economics aren't working for movie theaters. The number of big-budget flicks that Hollywood can finance is decreasing over time as theater attendance declines and the films keep getting more expensive (at least due to inflation). The risks (costs) are increasing while the rewards (ticket sales) are decreasing. Something has to give.
The foreign unions are all looking to see how this plays out. The shape of the deal for SAG and WGA lays the groundwork for what they will be able to negotiate for.
> Streaming distributors (e.g. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV) will simply go abroad and market foreign productions to American audiences
Very skeptical about this. You'll see a bit of it while the strike is on, but the quality difference is real and the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.
You might get a bit of e.g. Scandinavian murder mystery or Korean drama, especially following the breakthrough of Squid Game.
I‘m also sceptical that non-US productions can simply take over. Hollywood as a global industry doesn‘t really have any competitors.
> but the quality difference is real
It’s surely a matter of taste, but IMO there are lots and lots of European and Asian films that are extremely high quality and stand head and shoulders above most Hollywood productions.
> the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.
Probably still true at present, but it's a mutable attribute. All you need to change this is to consistently present Americans with foreign content they personally find compelling. This has already been demonstrated with anime; Americans who like anime become acclimatized to subtitles, and of course dubs. And it's happening again with Americans who like romantic dramas; they're increasingly turning to Korean content. It could easily happen with blockbuster action movies too, particularly since those are light on dialogue anyway.
If Hollywood is counting on native English content being their moat, I think they're in trouble. That's a moat Americans are willing to cross if enticed with enough good content.
> the average US audience hates both sub and dub content.
The Anglosphere is larger than the US. Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia each have domestic production companies that pump out English-language content that would not require dubbing or subbing.
A is for America, so not likely, They might have their own unions, but i suspect this could be an opportunity of a lifetime for foreign english speaking content creators (actors/production companies).
The production difference is not large enough to justify the difference in cost. Ultimately, the streaming platforms control distribution. If you're Netflix, and the cost to acquire a foreign production is a fraction of the cost of an American production, even if the foreign production has a more limited audience, which are you going to decide to purchase and promote?
Maybe streaming distributors could introduce premium subscription tiers to unlock access to more expensive American productions, but I doubt it. Netflix's business model is predicated on purchasing large amounts of niche content that, due to a global audience, are sufficiently large to justify the purchase of the niche content. Ultimately, the American subscriber market is just another niche, when you're building out a global subscriber base. American audiences can be uninterested in most foreign productions, as long as individual subscribers are interested in some foreign productions.
I can see that the system is messed up, but it also just seems like a lot of rich people yelling at other rich people. I can't seem to find any sympathy for the strikers.
> Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses? And if they're optimizing everything to deliver a profit, why aren't they profitable?
The suits are to blame in terms of accountability, because the buck stops with them. But the product as far as I can tell has never been more expensive. The new Indiana Jones movie had a production budget of approximately $300M, plus marketing costs (between $50M & $150M). If we assume Disney will pocket 50% of the gross box office, they'd need to make $700M-900M just to break even. So far, more than two weeks after release, the film has made just over $300M worldwide.[0] That movie alone is very likely to lose hundreds of millions. Movies losing money is the norm, but not to the tune of hundreds of millions.
What's gone wrong? 1) The writing has deteriorated. Stories have become boring & tendentious, filled with unlikeable characters, hackneyed plots and preachy dialogue. 2) The studios have become completely risk-averse. I can kind of understand why they'd want to be risk averse with budgets of $300M, but audiences tire of remakes, reboots and distant sequels. (I think the creative types have gotten wise, which is why "explorable" IP with large worlds like Star Wars or Middle-Earth have been cannibalized to tell stories that are tonally and thematically quite different than the source material, because the suits have zero clue. Sometimes it even works, like with Andor. Though even Andor has struggled to find its audience amongst all of the noise.) 3) The costs have gotten too high. I'm not sure if the streaming wars or golden age of TV or even just low interest rates are responsible, but the costs of production are staggering. This is in a day and age where technology should have made it cheaper to produce films & TV. When I look at Oppenheimer's budget of $100M, I can almost understand why it is so expensive. I can't explain the Indy 5 budget.
When I was younger, I could almost always find a movie I wanted to watch on a Friday night. Those days are long gone. At some point, Hollywood stopped producing anything worth seeing, and now they're paying the price.
> Has there ever been a time when the suits weren't ignoramuses?
The Sony leaks from years ago showed that the executive level lived up to every stereotype of an out of touch and ignorant executive that you could imagine.
It's possible that things have somehow changed since then, but I doubt it.
I would guess it's ESG and activism more than that. People aren't buying the racist, classist and overtly indoctrinating sludge that has been coming out of there for the last decade+.
It's boring drivel nobody is interested in.
Just end stage capitalism. At least these professions have balls and organization, something Silicon Valley is just barely comprehending as necessary when the good times run out
This is a silly meme, none of us have a crystal ball; there's really no telling how much further there is to fall. If this is the end stage, what are you going to call it in 50 years when people are getting themselves euthanized so they can sell off the last of their organs to put their child through elementary school?
Indeed, the science of socialism makes some fair critiques of society but has a track record of poor predictive power. It totally failed to predict the economic prosperity of liberal democracies in the late 20th century, and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. But I'm sure they've got things figured out now..
I'm not a socialist but this seems like some weirdly bad faith train of thought no? With weird homogenising wording such as "the science of socialism" to be considered and discarded as a whole. How did it fail to predict these things or should be expected to predict these things?
Like are you talking about Marx who talked about capitalism in the context of western countries said capitalism was a necessary stage of development that brings about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature? Is he or his ideas the embodiment of this science of socialism or is it broader and how broad? Does it include critiques of the kind of economic determinism you have in mind? What did 'the science' say about the sino soviet rift, vietnam, etc?
Is the science of capitalism embodied in Adam Smith or some similar amalgamation of concepts? Did the science make predictions about Free State Congo, the republic of china and modern day US?
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Socialism and Communism were purported to be sciences that could make predictions about the future. The Soviet Union eventually succeeding in achieving Communism was claimed to be a scientific inevitability. I think the "end stage capitalism" hearkens back to this kind of rhetoric because it purports to predict the future of capitalism.
I wouldn't take any "science of capitalism" seriously either. Anybody telling you their political or economic ideology is a science that can predict the future is somebody you should laugh at. No ideology can predict with anything approaching scientific precision or accuracy the complex chaotic interplay of competing nations and the impact of technology yet to be invented.
Ultimately, Marx and Lenin boil down to: "look at the material conditions of society (the actual territory) instead of believing ideology (the map)"
There's nothing unreasonable about that. In fact, it is an extremely rational viewpoint, and pretty bluntly obvious. That's why Marxism-Leninism (aka "scientific socialism") is "materialistic"
I think it's the fundamental difference between planned vs free market economics. While markets are generally thought to make rational decisions over time due to the decentralized signalling of prices, and planned economy needs to have someone up on top making "correct" decisions.
It's not really science, but they needed a way to try and quantify and measure what they were doing.
I don't understand the entitlement. People choose a profession. The dynamics of earning a living with that profession have changed. The fact that others are making money from that profession (or companies) doesn't matter and shouldn't change that. The fact that other venues or ways to make money that formerly didn't exist shouldn't change that. It's capitalism not socialism at work.
If actors/writers can't earn a living from the profession quite frankly 'too bad'. Am I the only one who was raised and was told that you can't earn a living doing acting or entertaining unless you are 'a star'? The problem was going down that road and becoming dependent on it and not thinking things might change.
By the way what is going to happen to all of the people that have jobs in and around the industry that makes gasoline powered cars. Nobody seems to concerned about that. I don't mean just people who build gas powered cars but the entire industry supplying parts that will not be needed by EV (or parts for gas pumps etc you get the point).
> The quality of their product has ceased to matter.
Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment. Artsy films might have a lot of artistic quality (like The Green Knight, for example) but most people don't care, they'll watch the latest blockbuster, which is where studios make the most money. For the people who do watch artsy films, understand that the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight artsy films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any artsy films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not true indie or art house films).
Interestingly, it would be ironic if, were these strikes to go on for a longer time, studios would simply think to invest more into AI which doesn't have the sorts of problems mere humans might, hastening the demise of writers and actors. This must be why it was reported that negotiations broke down as soon as AI was thrown in there, they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly. It seems like whichever way the strike goes, studios won't budge on that issue.
Edit: removed art house label as it was inaccurate.
> the blockbusters make the bulk of the revenue to even greenlight art house films; without the mass market films, there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).
Your assumption seems to be that big studios somehow use the profits of blockbusters to subsidize arthouse films. That would be wonderful if true.
It's false, though. Art films are financed from different suppliers of funds, and they even play in different theaters.
> there wouldn't even be any art house films (of a sizable budget like 10 to 50 million dollars, not indie films).
I don't know what this means. Before you were talking about arthouse films but now it's low-budget studio films??? What are you saying?
My mistake, I shouldn't have said art house, you're right that I'm talking about low budget studio films that are more serious in tone or have something unique about them and aren't just another action film. I don't mean indie art house films literally.
> Most people don't go to the theater (or even stream) to watch "quality," they go for entertainment.
A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else.
I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.
Panem et circenses has been around a long time, it's not a new concept that you're implying. People like entertainment, which is sometimes but not always a proxy for quality. We can deny that at our peril or accept that that's what the majority of people like and cater to them. That's what studios do now, whether we artsy media watchers like it or not.
What feels “new” (at least to me) is that we no longer have any sort of large gradient between art house films and “turn your brain off and consume” mass market films. In 2023, you’re probably either going out to see a subtitled Korean drama or a paint by numbers Disney film.
Distribution groups like A24 are still carrying the torch, but the mass consolidation of Hollywood really seems to have greatly diminished the variety of bread and circuses available.
Indeed, I assume it's simply that budgets are inflating and it's difficult to fund more and more films (especially as marketing costs grow) such that, unless you have a string of hits like A24, it's nearly impossible to get off the ground.
>Panem et circenses has been around a long time, it's not a new concept that you're implying.
He doesn't seem to be implying that this is new. Rather, that this is something that happens to any decadent society society where people are depressed and unfulfilled.
> It's _historically_ very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features. We are living in strange times and it's not coincidence.
Note the emphasis on "historically." This implies, to those reading, that you assume the current society is "abnormal" and "strange" somehow, to which I replied that it's nothing new. Now you can take that as you wish and maybe you didn't intend that implication and think you are "precisely" saying what you intend, but it's not so precise when multiple people disagree with how you laid out your comment. It would have been more precise if everyone actually understood you, even if they had disagreed.
> A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised for profit at the expense of everything else.
Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?
How are you contradicting my point? It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features. We are living in strange times and it's not coincidence. We have lost capacity for art that engages with sincere human experience, a concerning situation for a society to find itself in. It means we are losing capacity to engage with ourselves; it is no laughing matter.
Truly, these are strange times. We need to go back to the times where adults scoffed at the robots of Asimov. I mean the time machines and vampires of Wells and Stoker. I mean the electrically reanimated corpses of Shelley. I mean the ghosts and fairies and witchcraft of Shakespeare. I mean the demigod superheroes of Homer. I mean…
Narrative works can make use of otherworldly features without being remotely escapist. Shakespeare and mythology are fine examples of this.
Science fiction is historically not escapist at all, but that has somewhat changed.
These days we have adults everywhere who will openly exclaim their plain adoration of dragons and robots and hobbits devoid of any particular meaning or social value. They just merely love dragons and robots and hobbits. This is escapism and it's historically unprecedented.
Not technically wrong, but it is one thing to decorate the complexities and contradictions of the human experience, and quite another to distract from the complexities and contradictions of the human experience. I think we both know which one is happening today.
Jules Verne's books basically 'young adult' fiction in his day. I think the 19th century nature of his works, which may challenge modern readers, likely obscures this fact from people today.
I've been reading some of his books recently and enjoy them, he's a legend for a reason. But once you get accustomed to the style and archaic words, you start to realize the stories and characters are pretty basic. Where he really shines are the creative premises.
is this a bit or have you not read any chinese or indian myths? where do you think the yellow dragon being associated with the chinese emperor comes from? or Indira and the Vitra? what about St George and the Dragon?
humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.
Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.
We live in a time when adults everywhere will openly exclaim their adoration for fantastical nonsense. They will unabashedly assure you that they simply adore dragons and robots and hobbits, devoid of any purposeful meaning or relation to the world we live in. Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
> Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.
They are literally the same. Fantasy is just modern mythology and most fantasy is rooted in ancient historical tales or historical events. The Kree-Skrull war for example was based on WWII USA vs Japan.
Old mythological stories and religions are based on historical events and switched to entertain. It's almost a certainty that Ramanaya never happened but Indian invasions of Sri Lanaka did happen etc.
> Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
Ok and who cares? People don't speak ancient Sanskrit or old English either. Are you going to be complaining people who love English don't have the first clue what English looked like when it was invented.
> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features
Ever heard of Odyssey and Homer? That is adults being fascinated by escapist features long long time ago. We have records of adults entertainment and adults being fascinated by entertainment from pretty much any historical periods we have records from.
> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features.
For some reason dubious psychologists had a thing for King Arthur stuff for quite a while and I'm not really sure there's any dragons in there, there's weird fisher kings and stuff. I think someone is rich enough and has enough free time (probably over a billion now, but similar people existed in the past in lower numbers), they would find some weird thing to work on or think about.
Or just maybe I don’t care that people think I’m too old to enjoy the things I like, and don’t force myself to suffer through some art house cringe fest because some guy on the internet thinks it’s a sign of living in a capitalistic hell scape while posting on a site specifically targeting capitalists.
> they definitely want to bet on that as the future and I'm not sure what leverage actors and writers have, honestly
The fact that AI is by definition just going to create recycled, derivative content. If the industry replaces writers and actors with AI it’ll be their demise because audiences will get very, very bored very quickly.
How is it "by definition?" Just because it trains on known data doesn't mean it does not mix and match ideas in novel ways. Even AlphaGo a few years ago played a completely novel move in the game that was never seen or even considered by master Go players, so I'm not too worried about AI's "creativity."
I'm also not necessarily talking about AI creating the entire movie from scratch, it's a useful tool to help guide decisions. Personally I'm more looking forward to seeing indie filmmakers making something on par with a Marvel film in terms of CGI, without having to hire actors, rent studio space and time, etc, because the product at the end of the day is all pixels, data that can be generated line by line by a computer if only it knows what color to make each pixel. It sounds far-fetched today but in due time, everyone will have that power.
You don’t see the difference between playing Go, a game with strictly defined rules and limited moves available at all times, and the process of creative writing?
I’m impressed by what AI is capable of but it feels like we’re making the same mistake everyone made with self driving cars. It can drive down an empty road in a desert? Well it’ll surely only be a couple of years before they’re everywhere! ChatGPT can generate a paragraph of prose? Well it’ll surely only be a couple of years before it’s coming up with inventive show concepts, developing characters and planning season arcs!
I agree, it might take some time, perhaps years or decades (although I doubt the latter based on current progress it seems), but it is not an insurmountable challenge, as long as you are a physicalist, I philosophical terms.
Have you ever seen "Unlimited Hams"? It's an AI recreation of the famous steamed hams scene from The Simpsons.
It's the most entertaining nonsense I have ever had the delight of witnessing, despite being extremely repetitive. And at times I learn about pretty exotic foods as a bonus.
The original version was banned due to a cooking mishap, but there's a successor of sorts and it's more or less the same thing.
