Damn…
Part of what makes the internet wonderful is being able to access movies from all eras. Why limit yourself to only new stuff?
As an aside, the OG Little Shop of Horrors still holds up IMO.
Right? I am constantly watching shit from before my parents were even born. Shits well done yo
That’s such a stupid take. The 90s and early 2000s were literally the golden age of feature movies. IMDB has 58 movies rated 8.5 or higher, 24 of those were released in the 15 years between 1990 and 2004. That’s about 41.4% and includes classics like Shawshank, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and of course the LotR trilogy.
Must suck not allowing yourself to enjoy anything from the past, and only allowing yourself to watch the slop they make today. There’s so many great old shows and movies to pick from.
I was with you until you generalized contemporary movies. Great things were made back then and great things are made today. Same for shitty slop.
You can literally listen to writers, directors, producers, and actors all talk about how cinema now is truly lower quality (including their own work) because it’s specifically created to be a background not a center of attention. They specifically make shit for you to have on in the background while you scroll on your phone, this has drastically altered the quality of what is being filmed.
I literally just watched one of the best films I’ve ever seen, the Woman in the Yard, which came out this year. It’s very similar to one of my favorite films, but in a way that’s not at all a ripoff. (I feel it would be spoiling some of the fun to say which.)
Sure, there’s definitely good stuff to be found today as well. I’m just disappointed with the current trend of making remake after remake and reboot after reboot. Original content doesn’t get the attention it deserves in comparison.
Red Dwarf!
Right? Imagine not liking fucking Glenn Miller or like Sinatra or basically any jazz. Or ffs, Star Wars.
Yet another “look at me being all young and shit! Aren’t I cute?” meme. So much traction from these recently.
It’s still hilarious to me that CGI peaked with pirates of the Caribbean.
Where’d sound mixing peak?
Has there ever been a peak?
There’s been many technical improvements, but absolutely none of them have fixed the problem you describe.
Movie audio was crap in 19th century, and it was crap on the 20th century and it’s still crap in the 21st century.
Has there ever been a peak?
No, they normalized it’s so that it was all the same level.
Yes but there’s technical crap and ‘the audio caps out quieter than the background noise in every scene’.
Up until the release of the iPod. That was the start of the era where record producers would compete to see who could be the loudest song on your MP3 player. Pushing compression to the extreme, squashing all dynamics down to a giant wall of sound that smacks you so hard in the face you get a headache from listening too long. (Look up “Loudness War”)
Things have improved since but it’s still not the same as back in the day, when we had to keep tunes dynamic in order to prevent the needle from flying off the record!
Ironically I have dynamic compression permanently cranked up to the maximum in VLC to avoid ‘whispers and explosions’.
I meant in film. Being able to hear what the fuck people are saying.
Definitely after THX was created and established standards for sound quality. Prior to that, most theaters had a single, tinny, mono speaker delivering all the audio. THX made multichannel audio + subwoofer the norm.
So sometime between then and the release of the DVD, which introduced multi-channel audio for the masses. Before then, most people had VHS players, which only supported up to 4 channel matrixed audio though a stereo RCA output. But stereo and surround on VHS was a later development, with early VHS tapes being stereo only. (There was also LaserDisc of course, which could support true 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, but as we all know it never caught on outside of the enthusiast and educational markets.)
That said, stereo on VHS was a later thing, so if we’re going to pinpoint the peak of audio mixing, I’m going to say it was the late 90s, when movies were mixed for stereo on VHS. Of course I’m only talking about the quality of the mix, and not other aspects of sound quality, which VHS is obviously inferior to digital in that aspect. Unless we’re talking about VHS Hi-Fi, which is a whole other debate I won’t get into here for brevity’s sake (cause this comment is already way too long as-is).
Regardless, you can still have a good movie-watching experience in the home, but you’re going to have to invest some money, simply because movies are mixed for surround sound, and not the average stereo TV speakers. While I’d recommend a minimum 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup for the best possible mix, you can get away with as little as a 3.0 setup. You’ll miss out on finer details in the mix, but the important part is having a dedicated center channel speaker so that you can independently adjust its volume and actually understand what people are saying.
Any decent home theater receiver or sound bar will also have a “dialog booster” adjustment, and/or an audio compression function to boost quiet scenes and make loud scenes quieter. It’s usually called “night mode”, “volume leveler”, or something like that. (Sometimes there’s multiple settings).
Edit: Spelling, punctuation; added bit about LaserDisc.
I live in a tiny apartment and usually watch on headphones. I don’t find sound to be a huge part to movies, I just hate needing subtitles in my first language to understand what people are saying. I will not spend extra money for hardware to view something (ripped from) a fucking 720p-capped Netflix stream because the people who make them don’t want to make a good product.
Well if you’re wearing headphones then the solution is simple. Install Equalizer APO and then a dialog booster VST plug in (there are many, don’t make me do the googling). Alternatively you could just boost the frequencies you struggle to hear the most to solve the issue.
So I should fo the mixing for every film?
I cannot believe these people want me to pay for media.
There’s a significant amount of detail lost in using gates and expanders in film. Drives me up the fucking wall that we still use hardware and software that’s not very good. I’d much rather hear some noise than transients and tail air. I stg.
Probably peaked on the tail of everything being overdubbed, but really high budget and high quality. (So probably late 90s and early 2000s?)
Don’t worry though, it’ll get better. The tools and techniques people use are always slowly getting better, and it’s a very passionate group.
Boston’s debut album.
my lord that’s depressing lol.
When people think something from 2014 is “old” i laugh in their face as I crank up my 1899 Edison victrola.
Even as a kid I never viewed something old unless it was 60+ years in the past.
I wonder if there’s truth to the whole iPad generation thing.
I feel like movies haven’t changed much at all since around mid 90s. Like as long as current day fashion doesn’t appear in the movie, then i don’t see how a person would even be able to tell if a movie came out today vs. twenty years ago.
After Sept 11 films moved into the superhero fantasy land en masse, where good guys swoop in from the skies and save the US.
Cellphones changed shape.
90s movies did not have ‘MillenialSpeak’ / ‘Marvel-isms’. They had cheesy one-liners. Which were better.
Club scenes are no longer filled with Goths, they’re filled with Jocks and Popular Girls.
Scores are generally much less unique and interesting these days.
More frantic pacing, contemplation is not allowed, outside of arthouse films.
I REALLY hate the new fight montages where they jumpcut every punch like in Matrix 4. They never let it settle enough for you to get your berings, feels like it’s just a rabid weasel with a gopro starapped to it.
Art is conveying what you intend to convey, through constraints, bound by limitations.
The cleverness, the beauty… is not in disregarding those limitations, those handicaps.
It is in accepting them, and finding a way to do the job anyway.
They literally nauseate me. I would assume that wasn’t the intent, but to each their own.
Hrm, I was thinking more about well choreographed fight scenes than modern frantic pacing.
I … kind of lost my own train of thought and didn’t really directly reply sensibly to your comment, sorry.
I went off into how a bunch (not all, but a good deal) of modern fight choreography has basically been ruined by both the fighters and the camera being able to be fully digital… and forgot to write that part, lol.
Whole lotta stuff is a comic book fights now, uses cartoon logic, isn’t visceral and technical, isn’t compelling if you’ve ever been in a real fight.
… anyway, the modern frantic pacing of everything is done basically because a rapid, jarring scene transition catches your eyes when you, who have a negative attention span due to brainrot, are about to look away.
So, in one sense, they are achieving their goal, keeping the attention of those with no ability to focus… but in another way… there is no meaning they wish to convey.
There’s no real message to slop.
But when you firehose it very fast, in high volumes and vibrant colors… well it does hold a lot of people’s attention very well.
So, given my previous definition of art, and hyperfrantic pacing for a dumb story full of plot holes, that move so fast you can’t keep up with them visually or conceptually… where that is the point, to be a slop-hose of meaninglessness?
I think I would call that Anti-Art.
Worse than ‘bad’ art. It is its antithesis.
There’s actually quite a lot that’s changed in cinema since then. Since digital cameras and effects are incredibly common these days, we light everything very flatly so that it’s easier to change in post without reshoots. It makes lighting abysmally bad. (See wicked where the actress in vibrant green makeup looks a little grey the entire movie).
Pacing is also much faster, there’s more emphasis on not confusing audiences rather than letting things have mystery. Dialogue is more quippy rather than grounded.
Oh! And since there’s no more mid-budget movies, there’s a whole lot less comedies running around. Everything is either high budget, wall-to-wall action or grounded indie films with very little in-between.
Give us back mid-budget original films or Patrick H Willems will start kidnapping Hollywood execs one by one!
Is this somehow an allusion to Hail, Caesar! by the Coen brothers?
It is now! After I watch it. Thanks for the suggestion.
I was referring to the aforementioned YouTuber who blames the lack of mid-budget movies for cinema being so boring now. And blames several things for the death of mid-budget movies.
Im one bus away from Hollywood. I have some 6" zip ties and a chipped kitchen knife. LETS GO
Like the other comment says, the CGI doesn’t hold up that well. Luckily, the LotR trilogy doesn’t rely on it that much. I still hope they have the original unedited footage stored somewhere and we get a new version with modern CGI capabilities. That’d be amazing to see. It holds up mostly fine though, so it isn’t a huge issue.
Found George Lucas.
Lol. Hopefully not that far. They should try to capture the intent of the original, just with much faster technology and better tools.
And then the better tools just scrape most of it, because it’s considered then-a-days as “boring” and “not catchy”. I recently ran some old songs through Suno. Sure, the tracks are catchy, but they scraped most of the buildup, intentionally overlapping sounds and noise and after listening to some originally different tracks, they kind of had the same beat and vibes in the newly generated tracks. Hope that gets better instead of worse.
Better tools, as in rendering technology and hardware, not as in like AI or something that would modify it. If they do it they need to keep the original format and only re-render the CGI components.
The pacing got much faster over time. Comparing LotR with a new MCU film, you clearly notice the shift. (Admittedly, LotR was a little slower than the average movie at the time)
LOTR is MEANT to be slower, that’s one of the things that makes the books so good as well!! They take their time. I’m also weird though; one of my favorite movies is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
its the buildup of the story, its so much better that way. MCU is just cocaine for a quick fix, hence why its just garbage these days, other than having to push out that much garbage to fund thier streaming service.
You’re comparing episodic spectacle movies whose source is also episodic and based on visual spectacle to a set of multi book arced epic adventure movies that are all need to be viewed to complete the story.
I feel like if you’re comparing it to modern movies, the MCU isn’t really fare. Compare it to Dune maybe. I’d guess the new Dune is still paced faster with more action, but I’m not really sure. They’re probably not that dissimilar. Probably the biggest difference is Dune (part 2 in particular) has a constant building of tension, with no release until the end. LotR builds and releases tension in cycles.
Arguably Dune should be even slower than LotR, as almost all the action in the Dune books is at best mentioned, but it isn’t focused on. Meanwhile the new Dune movies, especially the second, added a ton of fighting that wasn’t in the books and doesn’t really fit the story of the books. The LotR books are slow, but it does give quite a bit of detail on fights and battles.
That’s not a valid comparison, lotr was waaaay slower and longer than movies of its time. If you want to compare against a modern mcu movie then you have to compare to a similar type of movie, like for example even years before lotr look at men in black from 1997
They’re called “popcorn movies” and they’ve been around at least as long as I have. I personally don’t like the MCU films very much, but their existence and popularity doesn’t bother me any. (Except that now people think even more wrong things about Norse mythology, but I guess that’s better than the Nazis having a monopoly on it. Hel is a very nice girl.) This year was pretty great for good movies and games.
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Easy: the effects got worse /hj
plus most of its catering to asia/specifically china at least for action shows, thats why Rock still get roles.
Effects have gotten better, but they’ve made everything else worse. Costume? Add it in post. Proper lighting? Add it in post. The entire set? Add it in post.
Add second screen syndrome and every new movie and TV show is perfect to have on in the background while you scroll through Facebook
Effects CAN be better, but studios often don’t give them enough time anymore, so they get rushed and can often look worse than stuff they did 20 years but took their time on.
The corridor digital guys have a video where they compare what an animator can do for a shot given 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days.
Some have, some haven’t. I feel like physical explosions often work better for instance.
I don’t disagree. Practical effects are are almost always preferable to CGI, especially with things like explosions and fluid movement. I’m just saying that special effects themselves have largely improved, to the detriment of the medium as a whole
I think I get your point better now, CGI has improved and is now being used for everything because it’s “good enough” but this has lead to a reduction in quality because no one bothers to do anything properly any more?
That’s actually quite an interesting topic. Some good things in the comments, too.
i recently rewatched the first jurassic park and wow is it so incredibly different from new movies. i don’t dislike it though.
Pratt-era is just bad, especially with pratt him self. the original JP used pratical effects and animatronics, plus a little cgi.
Unironically.
Saving Private Ryan came out in 1998.
Matt Damon was born in 1970.
So he was 28. He is now about 27 years older, so about 55.
Dogma was a fun movie too, especially with alan rickman as metatron.
I know a highschooler that won’t watch anything from before 2000, won’t watch lotr for other reasons like broken attention span.
tik tok attention span, aka brainrot material. i wont watch any from post 2010 , mostly because they are all slop at that point.
There have always been idiots.
A marathon of the extended editions is exactly what they need. Phone locked away during viewing.
They’ll throw a fit and then sulk if you do that lol
Did this with my 16yo a couple months back. She was sick last week and marathoned them again on her own.
I was so proud
You should be!
It’s honestly one of my favourite marathons to do on a cold winter weekend, excited for my annual viewing :)
Yeah, back in uni I used to do one with my friends at least once a year. We’d get about 10 people crammed into a room with a monitor, bring an unhealthy amount of snacks, plan to start at 9am, have tech issues till 11 or 12, and then watch until midnight or 1am with a break for pizza in the evening. It was great.
That does sound great, may be time for a sleepover viewing with the friends methinks, with some pipe weed
The fact that we’ve gotten to the point where looking at little screen is bad so we need to lock it up to stare at big screen, is depressing.
And I love movies, but the thought of that as a society is depressing.
But, it’s all good FreeVee isn’t it?
It’s not about the screen, it’s about the content.
Every new technology has detractors saying it’s going to ruin the children. Books were bad, then radio, then TV, then phones. The medium isn’t the issue. There is an issue with the short form content that is predominantly watched on phones though, but it isn’t the fault of the phone.
No. No its the algorithms.
Short form content is probably not too terrible.
It’s the algorithms trying to sloppify us.
We’re not using the heroin for surgery or fun, we’re using it to chain workers so they ho through withdrawl if they try to run away.
Yes I am kind of joking. The problem is, we have seen over time, books aren’t evil or bad (sounds like religious nutjubbery to me there) however we have found how bad these devices are because they are constantly dinging and giving you dopamine highs. Tell me this; will a toddler be more likely addicted to a book, or a shiny flashy iPad (that can later be leveraged by corporations into an addiction to fortnight crates/loot box shit). So in that way, yes, the screens are bad. Now I use my phone often times for reading, but you know what 99% of the population is using it for ? Mindless 6 second tik tok brainrot. Its definitely not a good thing.
Yeah, like I said, it’s the content that’s bad. You could have a phone without any of these issues. Mine mostly doesn’t, because I don’t use any of these media services or social media, besides Lemmy if you count that.
Yeah. I was just saying I dont think we can compare it to things people previously freaked out about because scientific studies are showing that it actually is hurting our brains, and the development of kids brains. And you can see it in day to day; no one has patience any more. My friends wont watch a dvd of a movie they have because its too much effort to get up and put the disc in. If something isn’t instantaneously gratifying they drop it like a rock.
Now of course if timmy watched 12 hours of Ren and stimpy back in the day I imagine that may have a similar negative effect. But the difference is the tv wasn’t portable and attached at the hip like it is now.
I own exactly one Blu-ray set, and got my Xbox series X because it plays blu-rays.
For the extended edition directors cut of lotr. 12 hours of goodness.
Yes! Lock the phone! Such a pet peeve
I find myself dreading watching anything made after 2010.
I’m not saying everything is bad, or that everything that was earlier was good. But dang…it seems like a good 90% chance the modern movie or TV show is just a bunch of flashy and disruptive CG, incredibly fast editing to try to compete with cell phones for attention, tons of with clips and one-liners. Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
And I don’t think it’s just “things were better back when I was a teenager” bias. I can still find older movies with those some annoying traits earlier, 2010 is just the arbitrary cutoff I’m using here. And I can look back at movies from before I was born, like Hitchcock movies, and see how much better they are at handling a lot of those things.
same, 2010, is when movies and shows became just SLOP. this doesnt include shows that started in the 2000s but survived into 2010s. cant tolerate the new treks, they are just too bad, aside from prodigy and LOWER decks. also the titles for movies are just lazy asf now. and theres the significant increase in copaganda, military propaganda movies and shows.
Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
The thing you’re noticing is that they’re mastering movies for home theater setups and then everyone else gets a bad re-encode.
When you’re watching a non-HDR 1080p version with Stereo sound using streaming services’ low quality streaming codecs you’re missing a lot more than if you had a HDR1400 4k OLED and a 7.1 Atmos setup with a Blu-ray encode of the movie.
The problem is that now there is just such a large gap between ‘smartphone on a slow connection’ and ‘$80,000 home theater’ that it’s hard to make content that pushes the latter while still being viewable on the former.
Well I’m watching my own Blu-ray and dvd rips on my own Jellyfin server.
And it’s like that in theaters too- parts of things are way too dark, but also with HDR parts are way too blindingly bright. Which causes my pupils to constrict and males it even harder to see the dark parts. When I turn HDR off at home it’s better, but the dark parts are still too dark.
I think it’s an overall obsession with hyper-realism and spectacle. Make the bright lights seem as bright as possible. Make the loud parts seem as loud as possible. There are trillions of dollars fighting for your attention and movies want to do what they can to get a piece of that. So dynamic range, in all ways, is being pushed past the point of comfort, and even further past the point of realism.
That’s like saying “I refuse to drink wines older than 2000.” Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. But, some of the old ones are very, very good.
If it’s old and people still enjoy consuming it, it’s probably good. If it’s new and people consume it, it’s still unproven. The thing about “classics” isn’t that anything old is a classic. Anything that stands the test of time is. Old music wasn’t better we just stopped listening to the bad songs. Old books aren’t better, we just stopped reading the bad ones. Old movies aren’t better, we just stopped watching the bad ones.
I watched Altered States for the first time a few years ago and that one got me more than most modern sci fi. It’s a masterpiece imo.
iirc that movie is like a crazy abstract art film, it’s surprising that Hollywood was willing to make it
It totally is but it’s so engaging! I had trouble paying attention to things like Mad God, but Altered States drew me right in.
I know a woman in her thirties with that same rule. She won’t watch the first Matrix movie.
thats oddly specific, only the 1st one, and not he other 2, the newest one doesnt count.
I finished rewatching all 6 movies yesterday and damn they are long. The last one is fuckin 4h long. But i still didnt have an attention span problem.
All the movies are older than me :3
I’m 36 and those movies were even boring at the time. Decent stories, but I would never go out of my way to watch them. If you must, watch them once and then move on with your life. I literally can’t watch them when people I know want to watch them. It’s like torture. Or just read the books.
i’m 38. lotr was aight. not watching them again.
i thought they released new movies all the time
Me too, but apparently they stopped after 2003 :3
crazy
At least LOTR has not been rebooted every 5-10 years like some Marvel/DC movies.
Even if there’s probably someone itching to make a gritty reboot of LOTR.
Rebooting is a proud tradition in the superhero comic book genre.
also MCU , adding the multiversal arc to the whole franchise,dont need that.
LotR has been done a few times. The Peter Jackson one is just so good that no one wants to be compared to it though. I’d argue that even Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit felt so bad because the LotR trilogy was so good. (It was also just bad, but the comparison made it feel even worse.)
I reached that trilogy a couple months ago. It wasn’t that bad. It’s not as good as LOTR, but I still enjoyed it.
I mean, look at the source material. One’s an epic saga the other’s a monthly brochure at the magazine corner shop.
I guess, it fits.Lol im definitely calling them monthly brochures from now on
Well, we had the Prequel Trilogy so I guess Peter Jackson probably needs to do an entirely unneeded Fourth Age Trilogy or something?
Prequel even harder and pry the Silmarillion rights from the cold, dead bodies of the Tolkien Estate, then run it into the ground with new films, or worse, a TV show.
Better yet, don’t pry the right, so you have to come up with entirely new stories and new characters outside of what you already own the rights to! It’ll be great!
Is this a Rings of Power joke? I haven’t watched it, so I really don’t know.
Judging by a couple of blog posts I’ve seen on it, it fucking sucks, especially if you actually care about Tolkien’s Middle Earth setting. Also has a lot of battles that usually make no fucking sense.
Yeah, I was interested before it released, but everything I heard about it after made me not bother.
I watched the first season and it made me lose IQ points. Do you like a show with lots of references to things that you know while it acts like there’s some suspense over what this new magical metal they discovered is, the identity of this wizard that’s hanging around with some hobbits, etc? That’s Rings of Power.
It’s the most boring origins story of everything from the movies while they seem to expect people to have their minds blown by the reveals like “OMG! that’s mithril! Wow! that’s Gandalf!” They were too busy trying to make very obvious things out to be big reveals it got in the way of there being interesting characters or a good story. The place where a lot of story takes place becomes a volcano land in single a day just so they can make a big reveal that it’s Mordor… it’s that ridiculous.
That sounds horrible. That’s probably my biggest issue with modern media. It’s all too scared to stand on its own, so it has to reference, or tie into, existing media. “Nostalgia bait.”
It didn’t start with the MCU, but it was definitely made worse by it. They had the post-credit scene where it referenced something else, then they just start having references in the movie. Now all media it seems is 80% references, and we’re supposed to be excited about it. It drives me crazy.
Everyone should watch the AFI 100.
