Directors/Actors Who Dislike New Movies

[Sin Agog]

Mega-middle-brow shite like that new Downton Abbey movie is worse than any superhero ever made.

[Sin Agog]

bit sexist

You're the one who said it.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Mega-middle-brow shite like that new Downton Abbey movie is worse than any superhero ever made.

Oh absolutely, yes

[Huxleys Babkins]

I think you need to calm down a bit. I have no problem with any type of film merely existing or being enjoyed by anybody. If you enjoy this stuff, fine, I don't care. Don't take it personally. And of course I blame the studios rather than 'blaming films', I made that really clear in a couple of posts in this very thread when I referred to the rot having set in before the Superhero era.

Exactly. When I hear that Avengers Endgame made $2.8bn on a $325m budget, where exactly is that $2.5bn profit going? Because you could fund a fuck-ton of Ken Loach films off of that. Yet it's not happening. Not a single cent is invested at the grassroots. That's what's so problematic about these movies and their stranglehold on the box office.

[Dr Rock]

That's gross, not profit.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

To be honest, I'm just going to put this out there, I think it's kind of gross to use faux-populist 'snobs vs. slobs' rhetoric to offer a soft defense of a multinational conglomerate making a concerted effort to monopolise the market with one genre of formulaic film! If you're going to do that at least get them to pay you for it

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

They're not even vulgar art, they're artless.

I'm not sure that can truly be said to be the case. A brief googling for whichever blockbuster you care to name will turn up tons of critical videos and essays, all positing this and that theme and whatnot. You can delve into even the most blatantly commercial film and extract meaning - though whether that meaning is "good" or not is another question.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

'meaning' =/= artfulness

[peanutbutter]

James Gunn being the guy who's constantly responding to these makes me think he feels a bit uneasy about his role in the industry. I wonder how some of these directors do feel about how co-opted they've been by Disney in comparison to what Todd Phillips managed to negotiate. Like, Gunn wasn't gonna get anywhere near those kind of budgets without a big franchise but he does seem like someone who seems a bit trapped in the system.

[Jim Bob]

Exactly. When I hear that Avengers Endgame made $2.8bn on a $325m budget, where exactly is that $2.5bn profit going? Because you could fund a fuck-ton of Ken Loach films off of that. Yet it's not happening. Not a single cent is invested at the grassroots. That's what's so problematic about these movies and their stranglehold on the box office.

That's gross, not profit.

You're damn straight it's gross.

[phantom_power]

James Gunn being the guy who's constantly responding to these makes me think he feels a bit uneasy about his role in the industry. I wonder how some of these directors do feel about how co-opted they've been by Disney in comparison to what Todd Phillips managed to negotiate. Like, Gunn wasn't gonna get anywhere near those kind of budgets without a big franchise but he does seem like someone who seems a bit trapped in the system.

He started off in fucking Troma. I imagine he is fine making blockbuster films

[phantom_power]

They've been dogshit because he's by and large had to take jobs that he doesn't really want to do because nobody will give him money for more personal projects, when he's made his very few personal projects in the last 35 years, he's always been saddled with miniscule budgets, meaning that he can't bring the visionary zeal that defines his best work. That of course all started before the superhero craze, but the monopolisation of the market by superhero films is another nail in the coffin of auteur cinema or even artfully made commercial cinema that isn't shackled to a franchise that dictates a formula. The point of Scorsese's grousing is that these aren't even good commercial films, like the MGM musicals or the Westerns of Ford, Peckinpah, Boetticher, Mann. They're toy adverts with sponsorship from the US military. They're not even vulgar art, they're artless. And the idea that they're increasingly becoming the only game in town should be worrying.

This is simply not happening in any kind of sustained and consistent way. The mid-budget film is by and large dead, and a few high profile Netflix projects cannot fill that massive, massive void that compared to a fertile time like the 70s seems unbearably vast.

You can make excuses for why Coppola has made shit films but that hasn't stopped other directors making great, personal, ambitious films.

As to your second point I suppose what you mean by mid-budget. PT and Wes Anderson still manage to get films made with relative ease and decent budgets. Netlfix threw a shit-ton of money at Scorcese for The Irishman. There are still loads of good films being made. They just might have to fight a bit harder to be seen, and streaming services certainly help that fight

[Monsieur Verdoux]

There are still good, personal films being made, but they've been increasingly marginalised over the last 40 years. What happened to Coppola also happened to Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich etc. I'm not offering excuses for Coppola, there's a general trend of increasingly pulling most of the resources away from auteur cinema, and the Disney/Marvel monopoly represents a further consolidation of that. PT and Wes Anderson made their reputation in the mid-90s, probably the last time that you could build a reputation as a director without doing genre or franchise films. Wes Anderson does not find it easy to finance his films!

And seeing as Netflix are deep, deep in debt, I would not bet on streaming saving cinema

[peanutbutter]

RE: Coppola, his revisits to Apocalypse Now certainly point towards at least part of the issue being that he worked with a lot of extremely talented people back then to steer him away from his worst instincts.

He started off in fucking Troma. I imagine he is fine making blockbuster films

Fine making them, but probably wishing he could make shit like Slither again nonetheless.

[chveik]

Apocalypse Now is one of his worst films.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Ironically, Apocalypse Now is a splashy, special effects-filled crowd pleaser compared to most 70s auteur cinema so Coppola clearly doesn't have a problem with big, extravangant action set piece-filled films, his angle of critique obviously arises from the uniformity and ubiquity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

[Funcrusher]

American cinema has been woeful for the last twenty years, and may well be past the point of no return. Good films have mostly come from elsewhere, particularly countries less enveloped in current American culture. The endless superhero flicks aren't even well made entertainment, let alone anything substantial. Whereas other popular genres like westerns, sci-fi or horror have some genuine classics, none of these will ever be considered as classics because they just aren't.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Even David Lynch, a true American original if there ever was one, has had to rely on French funding for all his feature films since Fire Walk With Me

[Sebastian Cobb]

That is very subjective and depends what you want out of a film. If you want something to entertain and thrill you for 2 hours without having to think much then I, Daniel Blake isn't going to cut it

One held a government that was killing people through austerity to task and the other is a vehicle to sell toys and merchandise to adult children.

[Sebastian Cobb]

And seeing as Netflix are deep, deep in debt, I would not bet on streaming saving cinema

Mubi are doing a fair bit of distribution of 'non-hollywood' films these days. Although I have no idea if, like Netflix, they're just setting fire to VC money.

As pretentious as it sounds their library does suggest they have an eye that cares about unusual cinema being seen, or perhaps its just a bit of the market they've managed to carve out for themselves. Great that they're doing things like bynwr restorations

[Mister Six]

Starting to suspect MortSahl's DVD collection is one copy of The Wolf of Wall Street and 4,999 sequels to Beverley Hills Chihuahua.

[MortSahlFan]

"I, Daniel Blake" was pretty good, adding some social commentary. "Sorry We Missed You" is coming out in a month or so. I hope he makes another one. Aki Kaurismaki, too, whose last movie was good, too.

To me, "The Conversation" was the most impressive of Coppola's, because he wrote it. It's just as great as The Godfather, which was a best-selling novel and also had the greatest actor with Brando, and a damn good cast overall.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

'The Conversation', yes, a great one. For me Coppola falls off after 'The Cotton Club' which is possibly not-so-coinicidentally around the time when he stopped being able to work on the screenplays for the films he was making. But Coppola from 1969-1984 is great, including 'One From the Heart' which is excellent and unfairly maligned

[Sebastian Cobb]

troma has way more charm than most superhero cash ins.

[phantom_power]

Either the malaise in Hollywood has been going since the 80s and therefore nothing to do with Marvel, or all those directors started making shit films of their own accord because they got old or lost their mojo. Before Marvel films the multiplexes weren't full of personal, arthouse films. They were just full of shitter blockbusters. Marvel are just an easy scapegoat to blame the ills of American cinema on, when really they are serving a different purpose

[Monsieur Verdoux]

They are the ills made manifest, a new low in the continuing decline, a culmination of steadily intensifying avarice

[phantom_power]

Tell that to the Transformer films, Tomb Raider and the shit that passed for blockbusters before Marvel started doing them right.

Again, they perform a different function to more worthy films. The two should be able to co-exist and it isn't one's fault that the other is struggling. It is the execs in charge of that branch of film-making that are dropping the ball by playing it safe with remakes, rote adaptations and other by the numbers attempts at tapping into existing markets. The 3 Marvel films a year are not pushing good films out of cinemas

[Monsieur Verdoux]

They've influenced the industry standard for ubiquitous, unending franchises, so yes, they have pushed good films out of the cinema. The two should, in principle, be able to co-exist. And yet they don't. Because the world, and the film industry, doesn't work like that.

[chveik]

Twixt is probably the best film with the word 'twix' in its title

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Oh yes and I forgot that Disney, the makers of these films, are buying up as much of the film industry as they can at the moment. This is a pandemic! American cinema is in increasingly worsening health, and they're using the profits and stock bumps from these films to spread the disease of corporate monopoly.


https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/disney-fox-merger-and-future-hollywood/585481/

Together, Disney and Fox now command 35 percent of the movie market—a historic number for cinema.

Co-existence is not the goal here