movies

Well at the same time, I just think that's more indicative of the progress of technology relative to the progress of the modern cinema. My TV is now very good, and films are released onto home media quite a bit faster than, say, the 40-year gap between the release of Gone with the Wind and the development of the consumer VCR. If I want to watch an expensive piece of audio-visual spectacle while it's still part of the zeitgeist, that's a pretty good reason to catch it early on a massive screen with Owlsey Stanley's Wall of Sound blaring from all four directions. If I'm going to watch a three hour long character-driven, thought-provoking masterpiece that makes me re-evaluate the world and my place in it, I'd like to be able to do that in private on my couch with a bowl of soup and a ~~thermostat~~ volume knob I control, and not be wrenched suddenly from the pastoral vistas of St. Radegund by the stranger two rows down ordering a Taco Bell off his phone while I'm trying to process my complex emotions. And the pandemic sure didn't help much either. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for however much they've declined in recent years (and ignoring Guardians of the Galaxy III, which was far better than it had any right to be), the big-budget superhero blockbusters have been some of the few in recent memory to be able to consistently deliver on the visual spectacle to justify the day trip, the vice-grip on the public consciousness to demand seeing it right away, and, at least for a time, writing not so offensively dumb as to make it still possible to sit through. I think it's less a sign of audiences becoming more concerned with spectacle than sincerity, and more a sign that people are being given more flexibility to engage with the medium at their own pace, and as a result the buzz around a given film doesn't seem quite so pronounced as it isn't all entirely done in unison. And while that does certainly hurt them at the box office, it's not necessarily indicative that there isn't a demand for them, just that people don't have as much incentive to make a whole day trip out of one movie when they could just wait a few weeks and do it on their own terms. I don't think it's cinema that's in a bad way, I think it's just the cinema.

Of course, this fellow made much my same point quite a bit better and quite a bit sooner and I'd be remiss not to acknowledge it.

Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch

I'd totally watch this, if it were a comedy series about these crazy creatures navigating normal day to day shit.

Honestly I'd say probably 80% of the movies I listed as "less-than" are actually super rad and I was kinda just hoping nobody would notice. But it sure seems like this guy would take issue with the pop music toy movie and Frankenstein beating up a werewolf and Michael Winslow making funny noises with his mouth, so, sometimes we stretch the truth.

What is the alien truck fighting movie?

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, released a couple weeks before Oppenheimer.

Yeah, I mean, jeez, Elvis spends the entire middle of the 20th century taking beach vacations and playing cowboy on Paramount's dime, raking in 3-4 million apiece (which was quite a lot back then) with half a script stapled to either end of an ad for his next record, and somehow that's the golden era of Hollywood, but Hugh Jackman pretends to have an adamantium skeleton for the first time in seven years and suddenly culture's being rotted from the inside-out by a new, omnipresent trend of performers wasting their talents goofing off for the frothing masses. Simple fact of the matter is cinema has been prioritizing screwing around with the audience over the illusion of artistic integrity since 1903 and anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something.