Not for kids. The audience for marvel films is universal. Anyone that was into comics from back in the 50s. You see all sorts of people at marvel movies.
Film Martin Scorsese - Marvel movies are 'not cinema'
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Not for kids. The audience for marvel films is universal. Anyone that was into comics from back in the 50s. You see all sorts of people at marvel movies.
Is there something wrong with making movies aimed primarily at kids/families?
What would you say you hate more - Marvel movies or Anthony Joshua?
What would you say you hate more - Marvel movies or Anthony Joshua?
People on bikes.
I don't hate Marvel films or Joshua to be honest I just find him over hyped and limited.
Marvel films I put in the same category as any superhero film or Harry potter.
They are for kids and while adults can watch and even enjoy they should not get obsessed and start calling them the greatest films ever made.
The fact so many adults are still triggered by a comment Scorcese said years ago is proof of how weird people take these films
How was 'the movie business' not the 'mass visual entertainment business' in the past though? And how were independent films accessibly to random people previously? I feel like he's pining for world that never really existed - or maybe very briefly somewhere in the late 60s, 70s, early 80s.
The nostalgic return to an old era have always been imo the weakness part of Scorsese argument.
One of the worst things about the MCU is the amateurish imitators (DC, the "dark universe").
The commercial structure was different during his era. As was studio slate composition. Out of twelve to sixteen pictures a year, only about four or five were really designed to swing for the fences (and usually only a couple of those succeeded); the rest were most definitely not all designed to be mass-market products.
And the "mass" part in "mass visual entertainment business" is way beyond compare now. To the point where he's lamenting the industry being controlled by that slobby gravity of lowest-common-denominator.
Basically, he's not really talking about 'wow things go big boom purty'. He's talking about purely cynical mass-market paint-by-numbers cookie-cutter lowest-common-denominator test-marketed product where the 'dramatic moments' are all collaged together from a kit, of which 'wow things go big boom' is one element. (For example, the "only a toxic male can defeat - via violence - another toxic male" trope. I don't have to give examples, I'm sure.)
As I said, if the period did exist, it was very short. I mean, what you're describing fits the pre-60s Hollywood to a T. Post-80s as well. And probably bits of in-between.
Cinematic Universe of Nerds Talking Shit.
I'd say its probably hollywoods golden age, and probably worth being nostalgic for. Not sure the cinema is the best venue for it anymore though. Things have changed fairly drastically in teh last decade and maybe the move to tv and longer form series isn't a bad thing?
I kind of feel that middle ground kind of exists in other territories now. Korea being a good modern example with Parasite and a few other foreign language films have had good success (at least critically).
Its dead in hollywood and has been for decades at this point, they're long, long past the point of caring for cinema as an art form. It wont be back until pretty much the entire existing industry has been burnt to the ground.
Maybe it's cyclical and will come back. Certainly all this discussion that's currently being had may be an incentive for change. The rise of streaming might also provide a parallel track, through which different movies can be possible without needing Hollywood.
Also, I agree that non-US productions and series are gaining ground (also due to the streaming, probably at the expense of Hollywood, and also of the typical US sitcoms and dramas.
But then I don't have a my love for or affinity with Hollywood, and Scorsese might feel differently about that.
I don't know too well how all that's playing out, but it doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing overall to me. I feel that the range of what's accessibly on offer for me has expanded - although my personal situation is anecdotal evidence of course. (And certainly not typical; I didn't go to cinema or watch much tv before I had Netflix. I actually went to cinema more afterwards, until the pandemic hit.)
Bit confused. Bolded part would seem to mean 'for all of Hollywood's existence except for the 60s and 70s (but also bits of that period as well)', which would mean not very short at all?
And you'd said "I feel like he's pining for world that never really existed", which seemed not to be aware that that world indeed existed up until around the mid-noughties. So it seemed worth posting that what he's talking about was largely the way it worked up until around 2005-2006-ish. He's not yelling at clouds about "how movie-making used to be about art goddamit." He's talking very specifically about the rise of the mass-marketed approach and the current resultant scramble towards the bottom.
Technically, this 'recent' big change* started around 1988 with the rise of Wall Street and the huge influx of new cash into the desperate industry** but now with banker strings attached. Those people wanted surety both literally and in the non-financial sense of the word, and really ramped up the process of market research and test-screening, etc. But it took around fifteen years for the last vestiges of the 'old system' to all retire/get pushed out/replaced.
There are places online that show the major studios' releases by year and one can sort of tell how slates were constructed: how many were mass-market and how many were awards-season fare and how many were genre etc.
This "blockbuster-or-bust!/only event pics now!" banker/insurance-company-controlled-tailored-mass-market-product thing he's talking about is a very recent development.
*The other two "big changes" in the industry are when sound was introduced and in 1948-ish when the studios were broken up, and over the next few decades, output roughly halved due to them having to be a bit more pickier about what they produced since they could no longer guarantee their pictures would get played until a certain financial point.
**moviegoing started steadily declining around the mid-60s and hit an all-time low in the mid-80s
Even John Oliver is taking the piss out of Marvel now. I love the audience reaction 
Yeah, I realized when I was writing it that I'm juxtaposing 'didn't exist' with 'existed for a few decades', which isn't really that short at all compared to how long cinema films have been made. Lazy arguing on my part, also to just leave it like that. Thanks for the explanation - although I'm still not so concerned. I'm just not bothered enough by what happens in Hollywood, I guess.
Just don't do that in your academic work and you'll be fine. #thumbsupemoji
Even John Oliver is taking the piss out of Marvel now. I love the audience reaction
For anyone who can't see the video(It isn't showing up for me)
I didn't, but I left academia 7 years ago so I'm good either way.
I didn't, but I left academia 7 years ago so I'm good either way.
#thumbsupemoji, Emoji, Thumbsup, p. i [MDXCC EM(oj)I]
Even John Oliver is taking the piss out of Marvel now. I love the audience reaction
He mocked Marvel, the audience groan would make you think he just told a racist dead baby joke.
Twats.
If only I knew what that meant! (The bit from 'p. i' onwards.)
Sounds more like the audience was in on the joke, the way they teed up the 'grow up' comment.
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No meaning, just a silly mangled date citation cobbled together from (some of) the letters in your username. BTW you're now about six-hundred years old.
Ah!
Yeah, I could read the date (wrong formatting but I'll let it slide), I just didn't realize it was my birthdate. The things you learn about yourself!
I really dont think its that recent. I'd put the big change back to 77 with the first Star Wars film and hollywood has been pushing that direction since. I think any artistic, genre, mid budget movies have been made almost in parallel to the hollywood system and had no meaningful support from the business and funding side since. I think the real death bell for them was home cinema basically and their economics being focused on a dying market. Their success was measured by their cinema run and their cinema run had nothing to offer over watching it in 6 months time at home, it still doesn't. The cinema experience can be amazing once in a blue moon but its far, far more frequent for it to be ruined by a thousand annoyances involved with being in a room with 50 people.
The big budget dumb action movies of today feel exactly like the big budget, dumb action movies of the 80's and 90's to me. The golden age of hollywood was a short period in the 70's for me followed by 4 decades of sterile, lowest common denominator, vacuous bubblegum. So yeah, i dont get the mourning, you're 40 years late.
These old remakes designed for adults are just as bad
Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka: is it so wrong to find him scrumdiddlyumptious?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...s-it-so-wrong-to-find-him-scrumdiddlyumptious
Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka: is it so wrong to find him scrumdiddlyumptious?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...s-it-so-wrong-to-find-him-scrumdiddlyumptious
Not sure what you mean by the bolded part, unless you were being an internet loser extremely desperate to feel dismissive at someone else's expense, which would seem inconsistent with the rest of your post. Sounds like you were aiming it at Scorsese: in which case I really think he still has a leg to stand on here. And I get what you're saying, too.
Star Wars "inventing the blockbuster" (and how it would take a book-length post to accurately discuss) actually almost made it into the post that you tangentially replied to, but I ended up removing it as I felt many posters IMO - @Cheimoon included - would be smart enough to (if not around here long enough to vaguely know they're talking with someone who's been in the business for a very long time) understand it was omitted by someone who obviously knows that particular foible.
That being said, it still took about twenty years for SW's "formula" to be distilled and its derivative source mechanics implemented into every.frocking.tentpole.movie. (Ten years if you count the Disney renaissance, but in terms of it being ubiquitous, it took around twenty.)
That being said: if you feel everything post SW has been horrible, I feel for you and hope you've still been able to get your movie fix from the numerous good sources still out there. The poster R.N7 is like an oasis for people addled by the onslaught. Hit him up for some great recommendations. I had to do that one time a few years ago and he might have saved my sanity.
Also, I'm kind of wondering which "big budget, dumb action movies" of the 80s 90s feel like which movies of these days to you? Honest question. Do you feel like you could you do a comprehensive list of items such as "Commando is to Mission: Impossible - Fallout as Predator is to The Predator" and so on?
I agree with some of your general points regarding how the advent of true big screen TVs that can replicate the distance to the proscenium was a huge factor in what's going on today and that the collective 'cinema experience' that people like Scorsese would champion exists mostly on the internet now and that it's not necessarily a bad thing, just different. (He might actually be unconsciously(?) conflating it with the cultural experience of going to church during his youth.)
It was a throwaway comment, I dont think i meant anything by it, sorry it came off as dismissive. I think its too late to be saved, Scorcese is an artifact of a bygone era and the only answer he has is to rewind time. I think he's probably the last place to look for a solution, which isn't meant to be a criticism of him, more that I think it'll need some new ideas and a 70 year old director who's entire career has been spent in an industry thats on life support isn't the place to look.
I think every big tent pole hollywood production post star wars (and i'd agree it took a while to push other productions aside) has been horrible. Except not horrible just shallow. Partly because i think the 80's were a pretty shallow decade in general but mostly because its only focus is money.
Jurassic Park felt like a breaking point to me. It was a theme park ride, it was the point hollywood perfected the mold for the star wars blockbuster. It feels like they've been making the same movie with a different skin since. There were some experiments on the way with comedy mostly in the 80's but i think movies form Jurassic Park on are pretty interchangable. Just as regards hollywood. I think world cinema is good and these criticisms just dont apply or make sense when leveled at that.
It didn't. I ultimately read it as a comment directed at Scorsese.
I agree with you a great deal. The commercial film has largely been 'solved' - to borrow a term from the AI field - in a great part due to the factory-farm methods of bank-driven modern Hollywood that Scorsese is decrying (sorry). This lady has a theory that there are roughly three types of creativity which then mix: exploratory, combination, and transformational. Hollywood's been running on the second type for quite a while and it's been kicked into absolutely st00pid territory since around the time mentioned earlier (2005-ish)
Also, in case you didn't know, the film is often likened to a poem and TV to prose. This has been a huge factor in the rise of TV/streaming shows and the mass exodus of writing talent away from film and towards the more long form of serialized shows, particularly because of the amount of creative control they retain in the latter and the lack of 'space constraints' that really hamper a writer in the former. That (along with the big-screen home system you pointed out) has also been a factor in the slow strangulation of commercial film - literally all the top talent ain't that keen on writing movies anymore.
I really like that meta-analysis of JP.
P.S. I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but the real top writers do try quite hard to add some layers on top of 'the skin'. Silence of the Lambs is the descent of two women - one victim and one agent (in the non-vernacular usages of the terms) - into the hell of a world designed for and controlled by men. JP (the film) is the idea of "family" faced with the age of genetic manipulation (the book is about a favorite Crichton theme: the illusion of forethought in the technology sector). Mad Max: Fury Road wasn't nominated for an Oscar for no reason, even if the reason is tres meh: it's a road movie with the dad and mom switched and that new family dynamic ultimately overthrowing the old patriarchy.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there are/have been people who are aware of the problem and who are doing/did their best to try and keep things churning, even if like you point out it really doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.
Good chat here but I think comparisons to Jurassic Park are a bit off. It's not that JP wasn't a theme park film (it totally was) but you have to remember Spielberg had a reputation as a filmmaker who wanted to make films for everyone, young and old. He didn't insist on fitting them into a single universe and many of them are quite different, so when you consider Jurassic Park you also have to remember he followed it in the same year with Schindler's List. Granted that film would have been better with a few more dinosaurs roaming around but the difference is pretty big.
That's the issue Marvel movies have by comparison: that they aren't made simply for the joy of cinema nor do they offer much variety. You kinda have to buy into the universe itself as a fan of comicbook stuff to get enjoyment from them, which is becoming more difficult as they force meta-references to one another. I'm always reminded of hypertext theory when I think of Marvel movies because alone have very little purpose. It's fitting I suppose that they've come of age in this internet-era because the marketing/films/fandom/merchandise all work in tandem.
Edit - Like, I get the point is to say JP is Hollywood personified but I think the difference then was how producers couldn't steamroll over the likes of Spielberg whose clout ensured a certain level of say in the editing room. I think it's probably why Marvel movies are tending to hire these second/third film directors because they don't have anywhere near enough clout to change the formula or make differences. We're brought back to an earlier, insightful point made by @hungrywing that they're being financed and decided by the suits, with practically everything else secondary.
That's the issue Marvel movies have by comparison: that they aren't made simply for the joy of cinema nor do they offer much variety. You kinda have to buy into the universe itself as a fan of comicbook stuff to get enjoyment from them, which is becoming more difficult as they force meta-references to one another. I'm always reminded of hypertext theory when I think of Marvel movies because alone have very little purpose. It's fitting I suppose that they've come of age in this internet-era because the marketing/films/fandom/merchandise all work in tandem.
Edit - Like, I get the point is to say JP is Hollywood personified but I think the difference then was how producers couldn't steamroll over the likes of Spielberg whose clout ensured a certain level of say in the editing room. I think it's probably why Marvel movies are tending to hire these second/third film directors because they don't have anywhere near enough clout to change the formula or make differences. We're brought back to an earlier, insightful point made by @hungrywing that they're being financed and decided by the suits, with practically everything else secondary.
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I don't want to put words in @caid's mouth here, but personally I think you and (s)he are talking about the same thing, just from different angles. That dude/dudette is definitely going to agree with you that they aren't "made simply for the joy of cinema." Scorsese really has a leg to stand on here. They'll once in a while use certain cinematic idioms to present information or emotion, but very sparsely. I'd love for a serious film-scholar to technically break down how many different techniques they use on average, for example.
Also, that hypertext theory thing with Disney/Marvel's serialized (read, comic book episodic) approach is master's thesis material, IMO (depending on how much one can flesh it out).
Very true. It started as me disagreeing and then I noticed similarities between what me and @caid were saying. Just different angles as you say
Somebody else can have the master's thesis though as I need to go to sleep.
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I think theres often interesting meta stories within the braindead hollywood blockbuster but i find its quite common that alot of that meta story is outside the film whether its a book adaptation or a spin off kids show that just throws a weird cool idea into the mix. I think if you take the 2 hour experience in isolation its, well its shallow (im back to that word). They'll hint at or reference something farther reaching than the minute to minute action but its just discarded in the next scene for a funny joke or a silly jump scare. Spielberg or Scorcese will drag it from one scene to the next because they've proven themselves before the formula became king and no one has the balls to tell them otherwise.
I think the short 2 hour poem style of film, like the Green Knight which i think was excellent, have very little need of hollywood budgets. I mean i think you can go back to the seventh seal in 1957 and i dont know what the budget for that would be today but im guessing nothing. You had that dogville phase which i think did a good job of illustrating that you dont need 1:1 perfect realism so much as an element of consistency to tell these stories.
And i think genre films are kind of chugging along with sci fi and horror having a good run at the moment which isn't to the taste of everyone but i just presume thrillers and r-rated action movies or war movies or whatever will come back around in time. And i quite enjoy the braindead hollywood blockbuster for what it is.
I kind of feel cinema as an artform is in good health. I think they should be pushing to find some revenue stream to replace dvd's or doing a better job of negotiating with streaming services and thats a challenge ahead for its future health but that feels like a completely different conversation to what Scorcese is looking for, which no longer exists and has no realistic chance of returning to the hollywood machine. Scorcese, Ridley Scott, Tarantino and a couple of others will keep bouncing along keeping the dream alive for a time but those who follow them will be proving themselves and doing their best work away from hollywood. Those who love cinema will have to look elsewhere too.