One of the reasons I became disenfrancised lecturing in film and have retrained as an English teacher is because of the fact that, increasingly, my first year students would //invariably// either love Marvel, Star Wars or Disney... and the male students in particular would almost always cite Tarantino, Edgar Wright or Nolan as their favourite ever director. And this was okay - they were teenagers - teenagers are gonna teenage!
But it felt like they were increasingly resistant to filmmakers who 1.) Didn't employ pastiche 2.) Used narrative techniques outside of Hollywood cinema 3.) Tended towards moral complexity and ambiguity. And that increasingly these things would elicit a kind of righteousness or even anger. Not in all students - occasionally there would be a student who would click with Iranian New Wave cinema or Tsai Ming-liang or Jane Arden etc. and that was amazing. But over the five years of me lecturing (and the five years of being a post-grad teaching assistant before that) it really did feel less and less... and I honestly believe that is because of what you are describing here.
With the massive consolidations happening in media there's jsut no more space for weird, more interesting movies. Unless you've gone through the blockbuster gauntlet and proven you can make the studio half a billion dollars or more.
I'm perhaps more concerned with the impact that it has had (in combination with algorithmic recommendations) on young consumers who in previous decades would have been more daring, I think, in their engagement with cinema (and culture more broadly). I've only taught a few hundred young people of course - it's a small and narrow sample! - but I'm not alone in having had this observation.
I think the kids, as always, will be all right. The ones truly interested in film will discover Godard and Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Welles and so on. The ones who aren't will still be exposed to a more international movies because they're becoming increasingly popular on Netflix and the like.
Of course, one downside to this is that international cinema begins to look more and more like Hollywood, but we may not be very far from the days when Hollywood will begin chasing Seoul or Copenhagen. We've seen it before, where Kurosawa was deeply influenced by American cinema only to go onto innovate and influence generations of Western filmmakers (Fistful of Dollars famously being an illegal remake of Yojimbo, for example).
Though the otherside of all of this is that companies like Netflix are now the owners of international culture and not just US culture.
Occasionally something independent will push through - I was largely impressed (and certainly startled!) by Phil Tippett's 'Mad God' last year, for instance. However, I'm much more consistently excited and intrigued by games I find on itch.io than a lot of recent live-action cinema, with very few exceptions (animation is, thankfully, somewhat of a different story).
Animation does tend to allow for more weirdness and independence but is built upon quite a bit more human suffering, unfortunately. The anime industry, for example, is basically built around working 18 hours a day seven days a week.
But, yes, I find that I often play games from the 90s more often than from the 2020s for similar reasons. Games were allowed to be weirder in part because they didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars of investment along with five years or more of development (Jason Schreier has recently made the point that a AAA game beginning development this year would be launched on the PS6 or whatever the next Xbox is called_.
I would agree in terms of mid and large studio games, but I think today you get more interesting single person game developers than you do single person fiction film makers because the latter is almost inherently collaborative.
Because I have children in my life I have seen animated movies more than I would on my own. They seem to require a gamer, comic fandom that eludes my generation. (Late Boomer).
Hey, just started reading this really nice essay I hadn't seen before and was wondering if you could clarify what the link did at "Then there’s whatever this is1." Cause now it leads to a 404 message.
I love your throwaway line that Margot Robbie will get to play Barbie until she turns forty. Some taboos--like the one against older women appearing in movies as anything but wizened crones--can never be violated.
See also: the impending Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Seth Rogen could not have been less dialed into those Donkey Kong promo spots he did, and that Mario movie still did gangbusters!
One of the reasons I became disenfrancised lecturing in film and have retrained as an English teacher is because of the fact that, increasingly, my first year students would //invariably// either love Marvel, Star Wars or Disney... and the male students in particular would almost always cite Tarantino, Edgar Wright or Nolan as their favourite ever director. And this was okay - they were teenagers - teenagers are gonna teenage!
But it felt like they were increasingly resistant to filmmakers who 1.) Didn't employ pastiche 2.) Used narrative techniques outside of Hollywood cinema 3.) Tended towards moral complexity and ambiguity. And that increasingly these things would elicit a kind of righteousness or even anger. Not in all students - occasionally there would be a student who would click with Iranian New Wave cinema or Tsai Ming-liang or Jane Arden etc. and that was amazing. But over the five years of me lecturing (and the five years of being a post-grad teaching assistant before that) it really did feel less and less... and I honestly believe that is because of what you are describing here.
With the massive consolidations happening in media there's jsut no more space for weird, more interesting movies. Unless you've gone through the blockbuster gauntlet and proven you can make the studio half a billion dollars or more.
I'm perhaps more concerned with the impact that it has had (in combination with algorithmic recommendations) on young consumers who in previous decades would have been more daring, I think, in their engagement with cinema (and culture more broadly). I've only taught a few hundred young people of course - it's a small and narrow sample! - but I'm not alone in having had this observation.
I think the kids, as always, will be all right. The ones truly interested in film will discover Godard and Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Welles and so on. The ones who aren't will still be exposed to a more international movies because they're becoming increasingly popular on Netflix and the like.
Of course, one downside to this is that international cinema begins to look more and more like Hollywood, but we may not be very far from the days when Hollywood will begin chasing Seoul or Copenhagen. We've seen it before, where Kurosawa was deeply influenced by American cinema only to go onto innovate and influence generations of Western filmmakers (Fistful of Dollars famously being an illegal remake of Yojimbo, for example).
Though the otherside of all of this is that companies like Netflix are now the owners of international culture and not just US culture.
Occasionally something independent will push through - I was largely impressed (and certainly startled!) by Phil Tippett's 'Mad God' last year, for instance. However, I'm much more consistently excited and intrigued by games I find on itch.io than a lot of recent live-action cinema, with very few exceptions (animation is, thankfully, somewhat of a different story).
Animation does tend to allow for more weirdness and independence but is built upon quite a bit more human suffering, unfortunately. The anime industry, for example, is basically built around working 18 hours a day seven days a week.
But, yes, I find that I often play games from the 90s more often than from the 2020s for similar reasons. Games were allowed to be weirder in part because they didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars of investment along with five years or more of development (Jason Schreier has recently made the point that a AAA game beginning development this year would be launched on the PS6 or whatever the next Xbox is called_.
I would agree in terms of mid and large studio games, but I think today you get more interesting single person game developers than you do single person fiction film makers because the latter is almost inherently collaborative.
Absolutely!
Because I have children in my life I have seen animated movies more than I would on my own. They seem to require a gamer, comic fandom that eludes my generation. (Late Boomer).
Hey, just started reading this really nice essay I hadn't seen before and was wondering if you could clarify what the link did at "Then there’s whatever this is1." Cause now it leads to a 404 message.
I believe it was a piece arguing that Marvel are our versions of the Iliad and Odyssey
This is the kinda shit that jes NEEDS 2 B said.
I love your throwaway line that Margot Robbie will get to play Barbie until she turns forty. Some taboos--like the one against older women appearing in movies as anything but wizened crones--can never be violated.
Was wondering if anyone caught that or if blowing past it too quickly caused it to miss!
See also: the impending Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Seth Rogen could not have been less dialed into those Donkey Kong promo spots he did, and that Mario movie still did gangbusters!
I think much of the success is because of Jack Black, who has never half-assed anything!
He's real good as Bowser!
The moral of the story here is that Licorice Pizza is a terrible movie.
True.
hahahaha