FIFYRod wrote:Maybe Aesop can chime in on this, I've been watching a lot of movies through Netflix and Amazon and have noticed a few disturbing trends.
The first trend is easily explained, the urge, nay NEED, to remake movies and tv shows. The remakes are invariably terrible and only have a vague connection with the original. Hollyweird [strike]writers[/strike] producers just aren't very good any more.
There are thousands of scripts raining down on Hollywood any given day. Most of them incredibly atrocious. But a few, showing real genius, get snapped up, auctioned off, optioned out, and then languish in development hell for decades because anything original and good scares the absolute hell out of the 27-year-old genius jackasses tapped to develop pictures in this biz. It's really that simple. Making any picture now costs a minimum of around $10-20M, before we talk about epics, or actors who think they're worth $20M@pic, and even though a blind retarded kid can make that back even on a steaming pile of crap between foreign sales, cable, and DVD/BD sales, the chickenshit morons who push and pick what gets made would rather make "Rocky 117", with Stallone in a walker and wrestling with a guy in the old folks' home, than take a chance on making anything new which would require actual actors, writing talent, and a gifted director. Also, being 27, they haven't seen anything except Saturday morning cartoons most of their pathetic lives, and wouldn't know a classic movie from the past or present if you dropped the collected reels of film it's on onto their heads from height. If you want to have some fun sometime, go to someplace like Box Office Mojo, take pad and paper, tote up all the films a given studio made/makes in a given year, then tally up their profits/losses. BTW, double the "budget", because they generally spend whatever the movie cost on PR, even on failed films, which amount doesn't appear in "budget". And if you pick a studio, make sure you have a glance at all the stuff and lines they do (New Line is Warner Brothers by any other name, for example). Box Office Mojo isn't as authoritative as the stock listings in the WSJ, but it'll have to do, because it's all there is.
1) LED lights are now transforming the industry. The bulbs give true color fidelity down to at least 50% of maximum output, and can be run off of house current (which scares the crap out of union generator operators.) But light panels of LEDs are new, and DPs get used to doing what they do the way they've always done it. In fact, the DP (Director of photography) hires the entire camera crew, and the Gaffer (who does all the lighting, and usually decides which Key grip to hire, who with his crew moves everything around). And the new electronic cameras like RED, and other offerings from Canon ad Sony are revolutionary. They piss off the still photographers, because they'll capture a scene so dark that a Canon 1 or Nikon can't even see it. So when scenes are too dark, it's generaly because either the DP was blind, or someone downstream f***ed up (like the theatre, the broadcaster, etc.) by not projecting the film properly, whether for audience or for broadcast, because their highly paid broadcast techs and/or minimum-wage flunkies can't tell from apples.The low light movie. Can't pay for more lighting? Are you using the "energy saving" bulbs already? Quit with showing 90% of the action so it looks like a black cat, in a coal mine, at midnight. I understand the movie takes place at night, or in a dark room but for pity sake, let the audience SEE what's going on!!!!
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, part of getting older is losing low-light perception. Talking from personal experience here too, amigo.
And also Yogi's note regarding the predilection for blue & orange lighting (which is visually stunning, because of the color contrast. The first time. Not so much the next 200 times).Shaky cam. Self explanatory. I can't stand to watch a movie that looks like someone with Parkinson's is the camera operator. Steady the damn thing down so I can figure out what's happening.
Spin cam. This is used in conjunction with "shaky cam" to do a 360 panorama of the scene to try setting things up. Or to show ALL the action from EVERYONE's viewpoint.
Remember junior high? One cool kid did something, and then everybody aped that, because they wanted to be cool too?
Welcome to Hollywood, where everyone, every movie, every show, and every day is like being sentenced to a purgatory of Forever In 7th Grade.
Especially for the creative, artsy-fartsy, "auteur" types. Everybody here wants to prove they're Wolfgang Puck, and most of them haven't learned the fundamentals of meat and potatoes moviemaking yet. So the shortcut is to do everything that other guy did.
There are maybe 10 genius directors (or writers/cinematographers/whatever) in this town. I could name them, but you probably know most of them anyway. There are something like 500 movies made/yr.
You can do the math. And you've seen the results every time you buy a ticket or catch a show on cable.
They churn out a lot of $#!^.
Since you're already past seeing first-run movies at the metroplex, for whatever reasons, go one better.
1) Provide yourself (and loved ones if that applies) the best viewing experience you can.
Splurge on a comfy chair(s) to sit in, with built in cupholders, reclining, etc., in a correctly temperatured room, as quiet as can be for sounds getting in or out.
2) Get the best, excuse me THE ABSOLUTE BEST sound system you can afford. Sound is more than half the movie. (If you doubt this, try and sit through a silent film, or go on YouTube, and watch any number of fascinating subjects botched by amateurs using only the built-in mikes, or some cheap Radio Shack one which they apparently hand to 3-year-olds to blow into and beat on a bass drum while taping, and see how long before you want to kill them all.) If decorum necessitates a great set of headphones as well, wired or wireless, so be it.
3) Get the biggest and brightest screen you can plausibly explain to whomever keeps the household finances. Anything less than 40", you may as well watch Gilligan's Island reruns on an old analog B&W 11" TV.
4) Nota bene that BD is worthless for any movie not shot in HD, or remastered to digital specs. For everything else or earlier, DVD is fine.
For, say, Avengers or Dark Knight fare, or LOTR/The Hobbit BD is the shiznit.
For Lawrence Of Arabia, not so much.
5) You don't have to bring out the Geek Squad, but get the sound and picture perfect for your room, and yourself.
6) Don't put the player under the TV if you can help it. Put it right beside/in easy reach of your chair.
That will improve the experience of the movies you watch, ideally up to the intended experience the filmmaker was expecting.
To avoid crappy pictures that were made crappy from the get-go, I can only suggest more discernment in your viewing choices, some basic familiarity with websites like Rotten Tomatoes, and my personal choice, a rather extensive collection of DVDs and BDs, and no desire to let someone else pick my movies for me.
Hollywood, for all its multiple flaws, is absolutely a bastion of capitalism in one respect: if people stop paying to watch $#!^, they'll make a lot less of it.
Hope that helps.
BTW, for the record:
Hollywood is full of Magic and Glamour.
The Magic comes every Thursday when the nice lady from accounting/payroll comes around to set with a shoebox full of envelopes for all the good filmmaking girls and boys.
The Glamour is when you're standing outside in the rain, in January, at 3AM, on Skid Row, in an alley reeking of human urine and other bodily wastes, to make a commercial for some piece of crap you'd never buy in a million years, as a penance for that shoot day you spent on the beach in Malibu personally putting sunscreen on five dozen 18-year-old spectacularly gorgeous coed extras in bikinis on a Wednesday last May.
Trust me on both of these counts, I'm speaking from vast experience.
