There’s only one thing movies can ever do for these people. They get nothing else out of the medium.
The film industry has never really recovered from making a big thing out of The Artist, let alone awarding it best picture. Represented a sudden fundamental shift toward insulated hollow elitism that turned out to be permanent (foreshadowing A24, Letterboxd, etc).
2 hours of static cutting between talking heads saying the most obnoxious things ever heard. Barely a movie. Tied with Gone Girl as Fincher’s worst effort.
Sadly, horror is now a vehicle for the same type of insufferable snobbery that was once associated with middle aged Ingmar Bergman fans. These people lack any degree of self-awareness.
HalmanZ retweeted
The problem with film festivals isn’t politics or too much horror, it’s no account “critics” getting accredited and shilling for shit movies becuase they want their name on the poster.
Horror stopped being fun once “critics” decided to elevate the genre as a bastion of social commentary and political resistance. Now we’re almost at the point where cinema as a whole is just an excuse for “the horror community” to get off. Kahn’s best article yet. Bravo.
Horror Movies and Politics Are Killing Film Festivals hollywoodreporter.com/movies…
This is how the Hollywood groupie journalists have been justifying IP slop for the last 10 years, going back to the Paul Feig Ghostbusters. Politics as an excuse for creative laziness and endless IP recycling. A “bad thing” becomes good with the correct politics.
Another aspect of how an industry which was based on the idea of low stakes casual engagement for most of its history suddenly became the exact opposite of itself. AmericanFilm and TV, as they’d been defined for 100 years and 60 years, both ended somewhere in the 2010s.
All of this is theoretically true. Unfortunately it more often serves to elevate bad movies than enhance good ones, at least since the advent of streaming in the last 10 years or so. Especially due to point #3, in conjunction with reserved seating that began around the same time.
Projecting on a theater screen is a cheat code to movies.
1. You trapped the audience in a room where they must focus
2. Interactive reactions with audience
3. Audience paid money so inclined to enjoy to get their value
4. Giant screen and surround sound immersifies
And...
5. Giant screen bypasses the ocular nerve. Eyes dart around and brain synthesizes its own interpretation of reality. Psychological cinematic effect.
Another guy whose film expertise is equal to a 3 year old’s in that he can broadly tell the difference between colors and shapes.
HalmanZ retweeted
Hollywood can not make satires anymore because they are a satire. “What if Hollywood cast out the suits and was run by theater kids”? It’s a joke that got stale five years ago. They have nothing to teach, preach, insinuate or pontificate on. They’re just virtue signaling so tediously that even the phrase “virtue signaling” has become a tedious descriptor, although still accurate.
Only if they’re Tomato-darlings. When Rotten-scoring auteurs start getting the kids into theaters, THEN we might have something.
The auteur might be Hollywood's next great franchise. nofilmschool.com/directors-a…
Zoomers can partly be excused for not knowing this, but PWS Anderson’s Resident Evil series actually began in an era before social media mandated that every cultural artifact be either mocked or worshipped.
