Last Film You Watched


dholliday said:
Typical Hollywood is mostly very damaging to the art of film. Since about 15-20 years now there's been a much larger focus on money-making blockbuster fare which dumbs down its audience, slowly eroding the mighty (and back then justified) influence Hollywood had. Hunger Games is the latest in unoriginal franchise concepts which don't seek to further the art of film in any way, and arguably degrades culture.

I used the blanket-term 'typical Hollywood' for Hunger Games in the way they set up the story: the camera lingers on secondary characters that will inevitably get more airtime: the bad boy is signalled as being the last one to kill right at the start, the young girl ally gets to have her final words because the camera long announced her significance. Overlong overlingering camera, musical cues and 2-dimensional characterisation instructs the audience how to feel about characters and what to expect of their fates.

That is typical Hollywood and it's boring because once you've seen one you've seen them all: the well-made ones can still be enjoyable (Harry Potters, Lord of the Rings etc) but there's tons of dross which all follow the same formula: all those crappy superhero movies are especially guilty of ruining Hollywood's name.

As coollino implies, world cinema offers the more discerning viewer many different ways to tell a story.

If we stick to our current era (since year 2000) you could define a lot of the films critics & film buffs generally recognise as the best films of the 00's as atypical Hollywood: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Mulholland Drive etc.

For dystopic sci-fi of the 00's, we'll be talking about Children of Men long after culture has dismissed Hunger Games. Which one was typical Hollywood and which was one was atypical?

Is the typical factor the main reason why the product doesn't much rate as a work of art?

Yes, it is.
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If you think Hollywood maintained some pre-commercial pure aura before '15-20 years ago' think again.

It's always been the same way, just reflects different eras. You can't re-curdle your own opinion into what you believe to be mainstream, independent or not. It's only your opinion. Modern Independent Cinema has already sold out to the mainstream through the founding and exploitation of the Sundance Film Festival and the monopolization of it by Weinsteins Miramax. Now absorbed into Disney. It all comes full circle.

The film makers you accuse here end up in the mainstream if they're good enough, the skills they hone through their own low budget films translate into big budget.

If you want to use a marker to place the current modernity of Independent Cinema as opposed to 'Studio Pictures', you might want to start around 1989 with 'Sex, Lies and Videotape'.
 

McBain said:
If you think Hollywood maintained some pre-commercial pure aura before '15-20 years ago' think again.
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That's a bit of an extreme interpretation, Mac lol

The sentence again:
Since about 15-20 years now there's been a much larger focus on money-making blockbuster fare which dumbs down its audience, slowly eroding the mighty (and back then justified) influence Hollywood had
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There's been a much larger focus on delivering the same formula time & again, it's obviously nothing new. But the focus has increased, filtering out more innovative releases, or making potentially-innovative releases more mundane (safe, formulaic). This increased focus means less risks, less risks mean less creative output.


McBain said:
It's always been the same way, just reflects different eras. You can't re-curdle your own opinion into what you believe to be mainstream, independent or not. It's only your opinion. Modern Independent Cinema has already sold out to the mainstream through the founding and exploitation of the Sundance Film Festival and the monopolization of it by Weinsteins Miramax. Now absorbed into Disney. It all comes full circle.

The film makers you accuse here end up in the mainstream if they're good enough, the skills they hone through their own low budget films translate into big budget.

If you want to use a marker to place the current modernity of Independent Cinema as opposed to 'Studio Pictures', you might want to start around 1989 with 'Sex, Lies and Videotape'.
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Of course it's all opinion. But then again it's a well-known situation in the industry that Hollywood is taking much less risks with its products than it used to, an obvious example of this are the incessant franchises, remakes, reboots, sequels and spin-offs...repeating the same tired tropes. As ever, it's all about the money. If you google hollywood taking less risks then you'll find hundreds of articles & discussions on this very thing.


Which is a shame as Hollywood used to also be about the art, about adding to our culture. This aspect is getting swamped by the increased focus on the mainstream formula.
 
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'it's boring because once you've seen one you've seen them all' this is why I avoid pretty much all 'blockbuster' movies. You can tell almost everything that's gonna happen by looking at the film poster.
 
witchdoc187 said:
'it's boring because once you've seen one you've seen them all' this is why I avoid pretty much all 'blockbuster' movies. You can tell almost everything that's gonna happen by looking at the film poster.
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aye, so much disappointment out there...recently tried Man of Steel & Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and was left with a very bland meh feeling. If you look at the originals of these films there's so much more character there: Christopher Reeve & Margot Kidder played their roles brilliantly, and Charlton Heston plus the clever characterisation of the ape characters: this charm and deeper character goes a long way in enjoying typical Hollywood fare, and is one of the main reasons Hunger Games 2 is so much better than the first one.

Seems modern Hollywood has somewhere lost the art of characterisation. The other problem being too over-reliant on CGI effects and hectic camera-edits, the more discerning audience struggle to immerse themselves like they used to.
 

dholliday said:
aye, so much disappointment out there...recently tried Man of Steel & Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and was left with a very bland meh feeling. If you look at the originals of these films there's so much more character there: Christopher Reeve & Margot Kidder played their roles brilliantly, and Charlton Heston plus the clever characterisation of the ape characters: this charm and deeper character goes a long way in enjoying typical Hollywood fare, and is one of the main reasons Hunger Games 2 is so much better than the first one.

Seems modern Hollywood has somewhere lost the art of characterisation. The other problem being too over-reliant on CGI effects and hectic camera-edits, the more discerning audience struggle to immerse themselves like they used to.
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Yo mate how are you today.
 
carlos21 said:
I am good today mate if you could post some pic please kid.
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I'm liking this lady at the moment...she's in the Hunger Games films

151106d1d990a113bca1a4474ef8644e.jpg
 

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