Arrival? BlacKkKlansman? Man, come on! Especially BlacKkKlansman - I was hyped for that movie, and that doesn't happen often, but it just straight away cock down the throat sucks. You could've at least named Sorry To Bother You, but this one... ooof. Really, the addition of these two sounds like a bell that calls to check your tastes, mate.
The Lighthouse? That's just typical arthouse, and arthouse... simply doesn't change much in my eyes. And even if you count that as a horror, I've admitted that horrors is probably the only thing that is better today (due to sheer numbers of'em), so I'm not sure why you've even included it. And even then, The Lighthouse... Yea, it's mediocre. There are better horrors, both around the time The Lighthouse came out and in zeroes. Pretty much sums up my opinion about Beau Is Afraid as well.
The Love Witch - didn't watch that one, cannot a tell a thing here. Also, The Batman, really? I... think it is needless to say that I do not watch those kind of movies too often, so I did not watch that one either. Though in the rather small selection of superhero movies I've watched there is The Dark Knight trilogy, and I really doubt that The Batman is cooler than that. Alright, third movie is 2012, but still, cooler than first two movies? Dooooubt.
I do not want to touch 2012 and 2013 movies from your list, because I feel they are much close to 2000's rather than to modern movies - and mathematically so too. And note how you have to go across the whole decade - darn, even more than a decade - when I've only picked several movies from 2006/2007. I can name much more across the zeroes. The percentage of good movies dropped down hard.
So... this leaves us with Bad Times At The El Royale... and, well, this one is a good call. This is probably the only one I can agree with. Awesome movie, hands down. Fucking A. Everyone gotta watch this title.
Technical prowess? It all gets replaced with the darn CGI nobody knows how to work with! Where's technical prowess in that?! Even in Terminator 2 CGI was better than what we see today. Technical prowess in Children Of Men alone throws half of the decade worth of modern movies out of the window, have you seen those scenes, that camera work, those long shots without a single cut where everything explodes, people run around and stuff, shoot at each other - and it's all practical for all that's holy - now that was technical prowess.
Perspective? Well, I'm not sure what you mean here, so maybe? Ambition though? That's a very vague one, and it really doesn't depend on a decade... at all.
It's fun that you talk about the morass of forgettable crap around, giving that nowadays there are literally babylonian towers of absolute junk being made one after another by conveyors such as Netflix or Disney. Guess we will have to wait and see how much of these movies from today will be remembered a decade later.
And people in general have tought times remembering anything that is not in a completely legendary position. Either that, or it must be one exceptionally long-running franchise, like Star Wars. Otherwise few people will not remember it, not matter how great it is.
I didn't say it was the best, and I kind of agree that The Big Lebowski is better? I mean, it works in my favor. My point is: pretty much everything after 2012 or so sucks, everything that was before is better. It doesn't matter if it wasn't in the 90's or 00's - the modern times still lose. Or, if you want, you can call it a tie, because a 90's movie is better than both the 10's one and 00's, but... really, what's, what's the point of bringing up other decades?
Idiocracy was primarily a Judge's screenplay, not Cohen. And I really just do not want to see a parody on these characters - I like them too much - so I do not want to watch it. Kind of a personal thingamambob, sorry.
I'm not sure what kind of weird veneer you mean, but ultimately, it seems, it all boils down to your tastes. Fun. I never felt anti-nostalgia towards the time I grew up in, but I guess it is personal, so... I dunno. I usually say that it is useless to argue about tastes, but BlacKkKlansman... I feel like some tastes need a fixin'. I mean, if it were not for bad tastes, things like Disney would've never been a problem in the first place.
But, well, at least you didn't name anything worse.
BlacKkKlansman was easily a return to form for Spike Lee. I don't like Sorry to Bother You because it's just a movie about a guy working in an office, and those have been done to death. It's kinda just black Fight Club. Very disappointing output from Bootsy Collins, who I'd say is one of the greatest rappers of all time but whose filmmaking leaves a lot to be desired. BlacKkKlansman was great, and it's one of the few films set in Colorado that I could relate to and understand and appreciate, so I give it credit there. I think Adam Driver and Donald Glover deserve Oscars for their roles.
Children of Men sucks, it's just about the world going to shit. There are enough movies about the world going to shit, that's a formula that's also been done to death. It might seem like a new idea or something, how nobody can have children anymore, but when you get right down to it, it's the same exact depressing slog as 28 Days Later, or World War Z, The Girl With All The Gifts, or The Road, or Bird Box- the list goes on. I don't need to watch movies about the world collapsing and everyone dying, I watch movies for fun escapism and badass good times. And those long takes- don't even get me started on those. Completely overrated, there's nothing interesting about a long take, it's been done over and over again and it's not that hard to do (2014's
Birdman is probably the worst offender in this category, just 2 pretentious hours of following around drunk Michael Keaton's ass). As for
Children of Men having practical effects... most good movies use practical effects. If a filmmaker uses CGI, they're a hack. It's not amazing to me that practical effects are used in a scene which is just Clive Owen driving a car down a road with a few ragged post-apocalyptic bums chasing him down. You don't need CGI for that.
If you don't like
The Lighthouse or
Beau Is Afraid, it's not because they're "arthouse" movies, or whatever- (If you don't think
Apocalypto is an arthouse movie I don't think you know what the term means) it's because they're legitimately good, unpretentious movies that are just fun to watch. The Lighthouse is just a horror movie, you don't need to be smart to watch it, and you don't even need to understand it completely- just watching it is fun. I guess maybe you're too uptight about movies. A good, fun, unpretentious movie that delivers as a movie isn't that hard to come by these days, and I would not at all argue that all movies are just recycled ideas, or that nothing good came out after the 2000s. I would understand if the argument is that nothing good came out after the 90s, because the stuff coming out these days doesn't quite live up to the 90s- but to say that the 2000s was a high point for movies is absurd.
Haven't posted in like over a year but I got a notification for this and can't pass up a chance to respond to THE mr sequeira himself.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 2000s, I feel like it almost had a purposefully baked-in in-the-moment nostalgia. This could he a personal experience more molded by having older siblings than the media itself, but there was this overbearing buzz that "everything is better now than it ever has been before." Just for example, every kind of movie was advertised and heralded as "groundbreaking" for the genre, people (myself incl.) wondered if video game graphics would ever get better than they were then, and ofc science is amazing and fixing everything and at this rate the world will be totally fixed in 5-10 years (which could be some of the roots of the "quirked up pop science" you've recently talked about, but I digress).
In that way, I think a lot of the nostalgia that people hold for the early 2000s can be boiled down to the fact that once the financial crisis hit, the schtick of "whoooa, guys, it's the freaking TWO-THOUSANDS, guys, everything is AWESOME!" was dropped in favor of a more relatable grittiness that there are, indeed, major problems we still have to solve. Building off the recession point because I'm a commie who's got to bring some dialectical materialism in somehow, a lot of people remember having more stuff, less worries, and more time and resources to fully enjoy the movies, games, and shows that they watched. Whether they were kids like me who suddenly had less gifts and a more tense atmosphere at home, or they were already adults who were now directly facing financial issues which they hadnt been before, it caused a pretty marked difference in most Americans' lives that seems to brighten the lead-up to it and cast a shadow past it to the present day.
I think that the rest of that nostalgia honestly just comes from people missing the ignorant bliss of childhood naievity, and people stuck in the consumerist mindset equate those happy childhood feelings with the products which they consumed at that time, in part because the corpos literally try to manipulate you into feeling that way. The hyperconsumer culture that's dominated the 2000s has really exacerbated the phenomenon described in that "
Capitalism and Schizophrenia" paper, wherein the brands you use and the movies and shows you watch and the music you listen to in part
becomes your personality, trends are considered personality traits and the like. In that way, nostalgia functions under capitalism to reinforce your relationships with those products that you enjoyed at some previous time in your life so that in theory they can extract profit from your childhood all the way to your death. That's bolstered even moreso by the built-in "nostalgia cycles" of advertising where they actively encourage (read: try to manipulate) you to remember how great your childhood years were and how it was those awesome products and all that shit on the screens and remember, that brand is still making stuff just for you, after all it practically raised you!
Got a little unhinged towards the end there, but yeah, I think people definitely hype up the early 2000s a little too hard when tbh most of the shit outta that era was pretty stupid in hindsight.
This is a great take. Good to see one of my based viewers here on the forum to drop a grounded, reasonable opinion.
I think the 2000s prior to the 2008 recession are markedly defined by a kind of active denial of the state of the world- people were upset about 9/11, they wanted to react to 9/11 by engaging in unhinged levels of patriotism and hyperconsumerism, and so we were simultaneously pessimistic about the nonexistent threat of subsequent terrorism and optimistic about America's new marketed status as a rejuvenated world superpower that could kick ass across the globe (even though we never ended up doing that). so really, before the reality check of the recession, much of the 2000s felt like a manic-depressive episode, it was America's bipolar phase.
I would agree, generally, that the quirked-up pop science thing started in the 2000s. Maybe with the 90s (Bill Nye and all that) but I think it did ultimately start out with good intentions, and kind of became bastardized in the 2000s towards the science-industrial complex we see today. The 90s were more reasonably optimistic about science's potential. After all, we had the Internet by 1994, and that was a great moment for science. We had a good reason to invest in science- suddenly we had this insanely useful technology that could connect everyone globally, put the world at your fingertips- and that is, I think, the last great invention humanity will ever create. I don't like being pessimistic, but after 20 years where all we have is roombas, and Juiceros, and Moneros- I don't think technology can reasonably progress any further than it already has, no matter how much money we pour into it, we've pretty much done it all. And that's OK, we're at a good point technologically. I don't think pop culture is out of ideas- I think science is out of ideas. We're not going to be building a Dyson Sphere anytime soon, so we should just save up our resources and make do with what we've got until the moment presents itself in a couple centuries, and focus on art instead in the meantime.
But as I said elsewhere, i think the main reason for the 2000s being so weird is that it's the first postmodern decade, and it took a while for us to acclimatize. I don't believe that postmodernism is necessarily regurgitative, or will only result in derivative material (as is often argued) only that postmodernism functions as a deconstruction and critique of modernism. It can be done well- as in the case of something like
Beau is Afraid, which openly mocks and subverts basically every narrative trope possible- or poorly, as is the case with something like
Birdman, which tries to mock the superhero genre but comes off as bitter and contrarian, and extremely pretentious.
I guess I don't have nostalgia for the 2000s because I never got to experience that hyperconsumerist mentality, that adrenaline rush of fancy Barbie houses and crystal shopping malls- I've existed in about the exact same state of near-abject poverty for my entire life, even through the Recession and stuff. So I don't view time very personally. I see different nostalgias for different decades as being like movies- some nostalgias are cooler than others, but it's all very fluid and each nostalgia is different. I can see why someone would be nostalgic for the 80s, or the 60s... I just don't get the 2000s because they seem lame in comparison. I do like to think that if I was around for the 90s- if I was alive to watch a movie as awesome as Jurassic Park or whatever, I'd be appreciative about it, and wouldn't take it for granted. But I wasn't around for it, so I dunno.
