Writes A.O. Scott, in "Did Movies Ruin Everything? How the film writer David Thomson found himself in a lover’s quarrel with cinema — and America" (NYT).
"What if he’s right?... For most of this century, I was employed by The New York Times as a full-time movie critic, which means that, like Thomson, I had a professional commitment to movies and also a belief in them — in their cultural impact and artistic merit, in their importance as vessels of human meaning. At a certain point that faith began to falter.... [T]he longstanding habit, among critics and other devotees, of holding movies apart from and superior to all the other screened content may involve a crucial category error. Could it be that, instead of being distinct from television, streaming, TikTok, A.I. slop and all the other screen forms, movies are actually their common ancestor, their home planet, the H.R. Giger alien xenomorph that has replicated itself across the universe of human consciousness?"
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51 comments:
"All the news that's fit to print". No, scratch that, "Idiotic naval gazing for rich lefties".
I was just thinking today that movies made after 2017 or so are just not that good. Beautiful actresses have been replaced by mid, I can see the like of those at any supermarket. The plots are preachy, the men are not Harrison Ford, or even Hugh Grant, but just kind of simps or totally evil, I could go on. I feel like the movie industry killed itself because it blamed itself for Trump.
I was an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth (Theater Department) while he was "teaching" film studies there. He was a blowhard then also and made a film featuring actors from the department. Never released, as far as I know. One of the participants on the crew said the film was "sex, sex, sex, violence, sex". I didn't know any student who took his class that said anything good about them. I roll my eyes whenever I see his name online.
The whole girlboss genre, is that about Hillary Clinton somehow losing because Americans were not supposedly ready for a female president, as if Hillary was without flaws and clearly the better candidate. If that were true, they would not have had to clear the primaries for her, they knew that given a choice, even Democrats would have gone a different direction.
Correction: Seems to me David Thompson is not, in the words of A.O. Scott, a "film writer," but another film critic who writes about film.
In other words, he's never written a story that's put asses in the seats. He's never struggled with the process of assembling the ingredients of conflict, drama and character arcs that are essential to write a compelling screenplay.
Worse than listening to one navel gazer is listening to two navel gazers staring into each other's navel.
AI: David Thomson is primarily known as a preeminent film critic, historian, and author rather than a screenwriter. However, he did write the script for the 1988 award-winning historical television documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind.
Finally! Movie critics are coming to grips with the fact that they're not all that important or interesting, and that the only reason they might've been marginally interesting is that the movies were somewhat entertaining. Whoops.
Again I cite my break with movies and movie critics was when Leonard Maltin described a film as "a disaster but not unwatchable."
I'm Joe Shit, The Rag Man, & I've been going to the movies since late 40's Saturday matinees, Each decade since the 60's movies have gotten worse &, correspondingly, my movie going has declined to the extent there's only one 21st Century movie I've seen in a theater.
That said, equating the crappy movies of today to the election of DJT is just ridiculous.
Don’t leave out television production. It’s from TV and movies that the culture pushes “America the Way They See It,” with a remarkably homogeneous culture: every white businessman is a closet criminal, every black person is unfairly treated like criminals while Nazis and White Supremacists are the only organized crime allowed on screen. Foreign criminals are also always Nazis too, never ever jihadis or red Chinese. All couples are interracial, all dads doofuses, all old black guys are harbors of ancient wisdom and all old white guys are racist. All gays are sassy and excellent dressers but never in your face activists. Trannies have to be pointed out through explication because the character has to believably be a girl or guy and fool other characters before the reveal and they are without a trace of the insanity that IRL creepy trans people have in abundance. Money is never a problem unless the plot demands it and higher education is always an unquestioned good. The obvious patriot is always the bad guy and the suspected minority is always innocent. Characters can always too out anticapitalist jokes and put down normies but everything screeches to a halt if someone voices any mild agreement with any traditional values.
Did he even consider that the election of Trump was a reaction to the shitty movies and shitty governance propagated by the Hollywood-Democrat clique?
“Characters can always BLURT out anticapitalist jokes…” got mangled somehow above.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...... there are just lots of movies ... millions of them. So which ones? I see black gangsta movies, white gangsta movies, Spanish ones.. etc... I see old John Wayne movies, Jimmy Stewart movies, etc.. Mel Gibson, just millions of different movies.. and which ones are he talking about?? Ice Tea?
There is movie running in this guys head. It's fiction, but he's very into movies, so...
Criticism has been replaced by reaction videos.
How can you argue that bad movies have, “Glorified violence and made heroes out of thugs, narcissists, and murderers,” and yet, “Turning our humanity upside down and our values inside out is what good movies do.” Which is it: Bad or Good? This guy is a very poor thinker. We are beset by idiots. Why should anyone listen to him?
DEIsm. Affirmative discrimination. Political congruence. Redistributive change schemes. Abortive ideation.
Ethnic Springs
If Hollywood made a movie where Trump meets Hitler, Trump would be made the most evil by making Hitler a troubled bisexual forced to do bad things by an oppressive German culture, and the Jews.
And don't forget "the Climate Emergency"! I will immediately shut off a show or stop reading any article that invokes Climate Change for any problem.
Trump is so all-powerful that he affects every aspect of the world, but not so much as he affects the half-empty brains of the Left. My TDS-afflicted younger brother has lost quite a bit of weight on those injections (and, to his credit, along with walking each morning 2-plus miles to add to the weight-loss program) and his only complaint: the cost, which is Trump's fault.
Hollywood produced original, if childish, content until circa 2000. There were plenty of black & white, then color, then musical remakes, but still most of their stuff was new and fresh. It was often banal beyond the violence too (see 1970s-1980s sex comedies; 1990s romances). But, it was often original.
Hollywood expanded on the niche Disney Princess theme after 2000. They entered a Marvel Comics era where everything came from a comic book, animated family film, or adapted TV/video game until 2016.
In 2016 Woke took over per Ghostbusters...frankly many people had better home theaters by then and could watch the higher quality back catalog. Hollywood started dredging the bottom for any new audience, and rainbow Woke was the only thing left. Tossing bones to a dying industry.
could someone give US a list? of these movies ( especially American movies) that have whitewashed history?
Seriously, can someone (any one) give me an example of a American movie (of the last 50 years) that has presented history in a positive light?
Huh. Remind me, when were "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Butch Cassidy" made?
Death means change, in literature.
Gee, ya don't say... what a revelation. Forty years ago Ronald Reagan was the "movie president." Forty years from now "that old YouTube guy" will be president.
Turning our humanity upside down and our values inside out is what good movies do....
A touch of the royal "we" here, I suspect. ("This movie confirms every one of MY prejudices, but it will make YOU think.")
could someone give US a list? of these movies ( especially American movies) that have whitewashed history?
As soon as Hedy Lamarr's ruffians were safely away, the people of Rock Ridge lynched Sheriff Bart and ran the niggers, Chinks, and Irish out of town. If you trust the sanitized Hollywood version instead of reading Howard Zinn, you'll never learn that.
Ponder, if you will, the competing examples of W.R. Hearst, Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles. The bien pensants of Welles' day considered Hearst newspapers to be grossly vulgar. They were said to be as sensational as a naked woman running down the street with her throat cut. But I think what they really objected to was Hearst's politics. He was the Murdoch of his day.......I would say that objectively Hearst got more things right about his era than Orson Welles. Welles was quite sympathetic to the Soviet Union at a time when Bolsihies were executing thousands and starving millions. If you want rampant narcissism I would say that the applicable example is Orson Welles and not W.R. Hearst. (I believe Hearst also had a better marital history than Welles. His mistress hocked her jewels to help him out of a tough spot, and both his wife and mistress mourned his passing. His life was nowhere near as fucked up as that Citizen Kane and especially that of Welles.) .
Amazing. Even thought virtually every actor, producer and writer is a Democrat.
“Teachers and critics
All dance the Poot”
Thomson needn’t worry, the creative types have appeared to have run out of ideas.
I'm working towards a theory of aesthetics fallacy. This theory, which i'm still developing, states that artists and thinkers get most things wrong and that they are full of shit. Take Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.. Oscar Wilde's father was a physician involved in famine relief during Irish Potato Famine. GBS"s father was a corn merchant during that period and must also have been involved in some way with that disaster Neither writer ever wrote a single word about the Irish Potato Famine. Their works all concentrated on other forms of injustice........Jump cut to the 20th Century. I would say that the greatest crime--not the most evil, but the greatest crime--of the 20th century was collective farms. From Russia to China and on to Cuba and Cambodia millions of people have starved to death because of ruinous agricultural policies. Where are the novels, plays, movies, folk songs that detail these horrors. It
s just not something that artists and thinkers take much of an interest in.
“and his only complaint: the cost, which is Trump's fault.”
It’s a damn shame they haven’t developed the medication that will improve one’s intelligence.
Eisenstein made several movies that were flat out lies and those movies are still considered classics. There were more people hurt during his filming of the Winter Palace storming than were actually hurt in the actual event. That hideous massacre on the steps in the Battleship Potemkin never happened. Some day I would like to see a movie that dramatizes the plight of the sailors in the Kronstadt rebellion. Trotsky gathered up their family members. Those members then called the sailors and explained how they would be summarily executed if the sailors did not cease and desist. The sailors ceased and desisted. They and their family members--those that weren't summarily executed anyway--were sent to prison. That's not the kind of thing that would ever attract the attention of Eisenteiin or GBS. Heart might publish a feature article on it though..
Jesus Christ, I am fucking sick and tired of everything having to somehow lead back to Trump. We get it leftists, you hate Trump - you don’t have to constantly remind us.
I've always thought it was interesting that big government lefties keep making movies about corrupt governments and brave individuals who oppose them.
We want macho men and good looking women. Not the bizarre, puritanical, too DEI oriented garbage we're getting.
…It’s odd the people who are the worst at observing history are the ones who consume the most ink…
what killed the movies is the politics, not the comic book movies, the couple two or three Tim Hanks apocalypse duds every year, the preachy break the fourth wall Meryl movies, the stars spouting their leftie fire and brimstone in their off time, as if protecting their image for their on screen personas had never been a thing…
"movies — especially American movies — have whitewashed history, glorified violence and made role models out of thugs, narcissists and murderers."
The Motorcycle Diaries, Fair Game, Milk, The Woman King, Malcolm X, The Company You Keep...many such cases
I don't know if movies have gotten this way because I don't watch that many, but television certainly has gotten coarser, and makes heroes out of bad people and normalizes bad behavior. I'm thinkin of shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. I'm sure there are plenty of others.
I recently gave a presentation for a marriage enrichment group I am in. I used movie and television clips to illustrate four common behaviors that are highly correlated with divorce and the antidotes to those behaviors. I had no problem finding examples of the bad behaviors in modern television shows/movies, but I had to go back to the late 1940's to early 1960's to get examples of the antidotes.
"Hedy Lamarr's ruffians"
That's Hedley!
https://youtu.be/8rUBrRRhlVE?si=vjUJ8GR6OSKe05tk
Like everything, the Left has ruined the film industry. By all accounts, the Best Picture was unwatchable and bombed at the box office.
At her substack, Sasha Stone has discussed this.
@gilbar: Seriously, can someone (any one) give me an example of a American movie (of the last 50 years) that has presented history in a positive light?
Positive USA history films were regularly released, if not the majority, prior to the Woke era. The peak negative countercultural/revisionary era came after John Wayne's patriotic "Green Berets" (1968), and spanned from the 1960s (e.g., Little Big Man, Easy Rider, Billy Jack) to the return of patriotic fiction with Red Daw, Rambo, and Top Gun in the 1980s.
Positive USA history examples from the last 50 years:
Mel Gibson, "The Patriot" (2000).
Tom Hanks, "Saving Private Ryan" (1998).
Tom Hanks, "Apollo 13" (1995).
Clint Eastwood, "Flags of Our Fathers" (2006)
Multiple -- "The Right Stuff" (1983)
Again - everything the left portray and lash out at - is all really about them.
They are the villains
One Battle After Another, Best Picture.
7.6 on IMDB.
Budget of $130m.
US and Canada gross of $73m.
Failure.
Compare to Oppenheimer.
8.2 on IMDB.
Budget of $100m.
US and Canada gross: $330m.
Success!
To these Hollywood leftists - Joe Biden was their hero.
Leftist love to feed their own hatred to themselves. It's a cult.
I blame radio.
He's not wrong. But he is tiresome.
11:56 - William.
Bingo.
Leftists should travel to Cuba and meander thru the countryside - it's all right there.
Michael Moore didn't bother, with his bullhorn on a boat.
Radio? Yeah - free speech on the radio should be banned by leftists cultists.
So is he asking for a return of the Hays Office?
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