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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?

I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.

I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.

If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?

But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.

Previous discussion.

One thing to consider is that the movie industry as a whole is... not all that profitable.

It peaked at $11 billion total domestic gross in 2018: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/ and has gone down since then. Granted that's just domestic gross, so there's also international, subscription fees, merchandise, hollywood accounting, etc... but that also doesn't take into account the cost of actually making the movies. Anyway it's a ballpark figure to show the size. Not chump change, but not a gigantic industry either.

Meanwhile you could compare that to any large corporation. let's say, Citigroup: https://companiesmarketcap.com/citigroup/revenue/ averaging around 80 billion a year. That's one corporation, not even the largest, vs all of Hollywood. In other words, there's a lot of money floating around out there that can finance flops and not care too much about maximizing revenue.

The other point I'd like to make is that, well, we've all seen movies before. Lots of them. Half the audience is barely paying attention to the movie anyway, they're watching it while distracted with their phone or something. So you don't actually need to explain all the detailed plot points of a movie. Especially when it's a typical Hero's Journey type thing, the audience will get the emotional beats regardless of plot holes. It would just be boring to stop the action and explain to the camera like "as you know, there's a special magical place that we discovered by doing long detailed research in the library..." or whatever.

I personally also subscribe to something in my head I've termed the Total Media Hypothesis: as society progresses, but old media sticks around in easily accessible form, the best of the older media is still excellent quality capable of delivering enjoyment and increasingly competes with new offerings. Naturally, there will always be a place for newer media due to network effects and recency bias, but on the whole eventually new media will get squeezed asymptotically to almost exclusively fit into the maximum capacity of this recency segment in the long run, because the quality simply can't otherwise compete. As to what exactly this asymptotic number is, that's up for debate, and depends on media type, but I'd hazard a guess at about one quarter at most. Meaning, that in the next few decades, total new release movie and TV consumption will account for at most a quarter of all total media consumption in any given year.

We already see this happening with video games: the old games are, quite often, still pretty fun, and the graphics are decent enough in many cases. This limits opportunities for newcomers. It's also magnified by a segment of 'evergreen' games that have reached a critical community/fun/variety threshold such that they consume many hours and effectively never die, such as League of Legends and Counterstrike, and maybe even Minecraft. These suck up so many gamer hours that new (especially multiplayer) entrants struggle to get enough oxygen. Of course although many people like to rewatch movies, there isn't anything quite like the evergreen multiplayer games, but still, in terms of hours played current-year releases only account for like 10 to 15 percent ish of playtime (source). For books, it's more like one third of sales are new books, but that's sales; if we count reading library books which are mostly older books, and count only books not retail pricing value, that number surely drops significantly and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being a similar percentage. So maybe my asymptote guess is high and 15% is more realistic.

I agree with you about games, and to some extent TV and books- games take so long to play, and there's so many old good ones, that we just don't have time to keep up with all the new released games. Even if you buy them all to test them out, it's only scratching the surface, which really doesn't do them justice.

Movies are a bit different since they really don't take much time or effort to watch. Especially if you just focus on the big mainstream Hollywood movies, you can just see 1 or 2 a month and pretty much keep up with all of them. But admittedly I don't even do that much anymore... it's just so rare to find a new movie that interests me.

Meanwhile you could compare that to any large corporation. let's say, Citigroup:

You picked the 99th biggest company in the world, that's not just "any large" corporation, that's a mega-bank behemoth.

Insane how small Hollywood is though, I had no idea

Well yeah I wasn't trying to just pick one at random. But I didn't pick the very largest either.

We could also look at wall street as a whole: 198 income against 856 billion last year.

But of course Hollywood has huge propaganda/marketing value that might be hard to measure.

Hollywood was always a platform for activism but it was understood that it was ultimately a business at the end of the day. The people in charge of Hollywood don't want to be capitalists in the business of selling tickets and getting bums in seats. They want to be activists, full stop. Talent no longer cares about profitability or marketability and the executives no longer care about artistry or culture. End result: slop.

They used to rewrite movies until the execs thought they were good. Maybe they didn't have to do that to make money and that's why they stopped or maybe the execs that did that were replaced and the newer execs don't because they don't care or it's become harder to do something like rewriting a movie four or five times until you get something that you think is right like Gladiator. But it used to be a pretty common thing, Tom Stoppard would punch up all the dialogue in The Last Crusade or Aaron Sorkin for the Rock/Enemy of the State but I don't here about script doctors anymore and not really about things like Gladiator where they just couldn't stop rewriting it. I don't hear about studio meddling anymore, do you?

I look at things like Smile today (many days ago, I guess) and I can see that the execs knew they had a hit there with the idea alone. They got a really fancy production team on board, they got Cristobal Tapia De Veer for the music, They got decent to good actors, they marketed the shit out of it but they didn't try to fix the CW-level plot that existed in the middle for some reason. Maybe the execs that were artists themselves and could see what made something good or not are gone and now we're left with people who can only see what makes money because the two things are so far apart now. There's nobody like Roger Corman looking at your movie and telling you its shit because it doesn't have enough explosions and then shrugging and giving you carte blanche to go out and shoot the movie again with more explosions. But everyone's an auteur. There's some kind of allegory or symbolism. Can you imagine someone trying to fix the extra hour that exists in the Substance for some reason nowadays? They'd get quiet cancelled or something like that like that for "being a piece of shit."

But I suspect the main reason is that it makes no difference. Maybe it did at one point but there's no reason to try to fix Love and Thunder when it will probably piss Taika off and all the people who have to come for reshoots and you won't make any more money. Who'd want to take charge of something like that anyway? Joss Whedon was basically cancelled for dealing with the people on the Justice League reshoot and trying to get a black person to say lines in the script.

Though it's also clear that there are many major executive decisions at studios to not make things good. You can look at Amazon or Netflix, they didn't try to get good writers or even lovers of the material they were making for The Witcher or Wheel of Time. Why would Disney continue to employ Russel T. Davies to take a massive shit on Doctor Who again? Maybe its cheaper but Russel T. Davies is probably more expensive than the CW also-rans that seem to be able to get their hands on best-selling book franchises, so I expect there's a lot of cronyism or simply just lack of any understanding or care about the things they're making because known IPs don't have to be good they just have to exist so give The Witcher to that girl that wrote a few episodes of Riverdale or let's reboot Buffy with someone that wrote an episode of Poker Face. If it fails who cares we made some money and we can just reboot it again later.

Screenwriting is a specific skill on which the screenwriter's guild has a monopoly. My guess is this'll get disrupted by AI eventually(remember that I am on record as thinking AI will have relatively minimal impacts to the economy), but that skill is mostly about formatting. Except these people refuse to acknowledge that they aren't creative professionals and have a monopolistic guild backing them up, so they can wreck filmography trying to 'express themselves'.

Revolt of the woke embarrassed elites, sure, but I don't think the proximal cause is shoving too much gayness in.

Wasn't AI banning part of the more recent negotiations?

Yeah, but guild-busting is an accelerating trend in Hollywood.

Blockbuster movies make half their money or more in the foreign market. They are designed to be easily digestible and offend not the sensibilities of the foreign market. That only leaves room for action sequences for some reason. It’s just dollars at the end of the day.

Yeah, and think about how garbled the movie is going to be after it's been translated and subbed/dubbed into a hundred different languages with all different cultural contexts. There's just no way to make a tightly-written plot under that kind of limitation.

It's probably related to attributes of people who do go to movies in the evening, pay full price, and don't sneak food in for cheap in their backpacks. I'm not sure I know anyone like that, so I can't say what they're looking for in a movie. Personally, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in about a decade, and even then I went about once or twice a year (but would go when convenient and buy some snacks when I did). So the companies don't have to consider my preferences, or the preferences of people like me.

Who went to Mufasa opening weekend? Why did they do it?

Brandon Sanderson occasionally comments a bit, cautiously because he does actually want Mistborn movies, about what it's like trying to work with a big film studio, and it sounds like normal, decent, popular writers have a great deal of trouble interfacing with them, mostly because the studios change things for reasons that are their own, unrelated to the writers or audience members. There are too many fingers in the pie. That shows up when they do try to adapt popular recent franchises -- I watched Good Omens, Sandman, and The Wheel of Time, and enjoyed many things about them, especially costuming, music, credits sequences, and some of the acting. But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things. And then maybe they get cancelled at an inopportune moment.

It's probably related to attributes of people who do go to movies in the evening, pay full price, and don't sneak food in for cheap in their backpacks.

No it is not. While theaters would prefer that studios focus on getting these people to buy tickets(I have, personally, never seen a movie at full price unless it was date night), they are not affiliated with the studios. Studios don't care if theaters are solvent. They care about their licensing fees.

But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things.

Yeah, I've been reading the complaints that the reason "Elio" failed for Pixar was because of all the changes the studio made (apparently in a panic after the first test screening where people allegedly liked the movie but nobody wanted to pay to watch it in a cinema). That sounds reasonable - too many cooks spoil the broth, after all - but the complaints go on about how they reduced the queerness and cut out its queer heart and dropped all the hints that Elio is gay.

The 11 year old lead character has to be explicitly gay, or else the movie fails? I think it failed because of the damn eye patch in the marketing (what little there was of it, I hadn't a clue there was a new Pixar movie out until I started seeing all the pieces about how it bombed) - you stick an eye patch on a kid character, you make it look like your movie is going to be A Moral Lesson And Lecture About The Differently Abled And Inclusion, not a fun sci-fi romp for the kids.

That, and the bean mouth style.

This is entirely beside the point, but Kubo and the Two Strings is a masterpiece and I won't hear any different. I don't think it performed outstanding but it at least made back its budget. Although interestingly, at least in the posters I can find you can't really see the eyepatch. It just looks like he has his hair pulled over one eye.

Marketing (or lack of) certainly didn't do Elio any favors - this is not how a studio promotes something they have faith in and want to support.

But yeah, I hate that bean mouth style also. It looks ridiculous.

I thought it was good, but weak. The story wasn't well-developed. And there seems to have been no follow-up or sequel as you'd expect.

It's just... forgettable.

The title doesn't describe what the movie is about, the MC is ugly (chimp face, permanent black purple eye) and [if the critics are to be believed, was if not still is] fag-coded, and the aliens' appearance doesn't suggest any interesting personality traits.

So yeah, "I'd let my kid watch it on Netflix, but I wouldn't pay 60 dollars to see it" is a pretty apt observation.

eye patch on a kid character

Eye patches are only appropriate on kid characters if they make him/her look like a pirate for obvious reasons.

Oh yeah - make this a pirate movie, it'll work. Even a space pirate movie. But that doesn't seem to be what it is. People judge by the marketing, so seeing something with a kid with an eyepatch, that looks to be "moral lecture about disability". I was going "why the hell is he wearing an eyepatch?" when looking at the posters etc. instead of going "oh this looks like fun kid's SF cartoon and maybe smart as well!"

It’s also strategically inadvisable in a genre that relies on the characters’ large expressive eyes.

you stick an eye patch on a kid character, you make it look like your movie is going to be A Moral Lesson And Lecture About The Differently Abled And Inclusion, not a fun sci-fi romp for the kids

I strongly suspect this was a major part of the flop, especially since the very minimal marketing really made it look like “eyepatch kid movie, also with some aliens or something.” Especially when paired with the very generic artstyle… a big draw for Pixar movies was always the excellent animation, this looked like it could’ve been any random direct-to-streaming slop.

The concept of “kid gets accidentally called up to be Earth’s ambassador to aliens” is a good idea, too! Just bring some actual creativity to the art and don’t feel obligated to make it a coming-out allegory or totally centered on him being a weird outcast or whatever (to be fair I don’t know if that last part is true but it’s hard to imagine it isn’t, what with the eyepatch and all). Clearly that’s a huge ask for Disney these days though (and by extension Pixar).

Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.

Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.

I don't necessarily think that was a problem, considering how well liked Coco is, but Coco has a much better hook. There are school field trips to see live musical performances inspired by Coco, for instance, which they organize around Day of the Dead.

Luca was at least very summery, and came out when the art style was a bit fresher. I thought it was cute, and my four year old liked it a lot.

I didn’t care for Luca much. In general, I think Pixar does best at movies that show “the world within the world”, where there are non-human characters who are related in some way to humans and we see what the “human world” is like from their perspective. Once you notice that pattern, you realize all of Pixar’s best movies fit that pattern.

Toy Story is about toys who have to navigate the world of children playing with them. Monsters inc is about monsters who scare humans, but are deathly afraid of them. Finding Nemo is about fish having to navigate the world of commercial fishing and aquariums. Wall-E is about robots who have to clean up after lazy humans. Ratatouille is about rats navigating an human kitchen. Inside Out is about internal emotions who have to try and regulate themselves to deal with the problems of their host person. (Not actually the first time Disney developed that concept.)

The Incredibles breaks the mold, but I guess it depends on whether you consider supers human or non-human. Regardless, it participates in the same “secret world within the world” trope.

Luca, Brave, Up, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world. I find that inherently less interesting. Coco is by far the best out of the bunch; day of the dead has such color as a cultural festival, and the idea of an elderly grandmother with memory issues remembering her father is such a raw and poignant human experience that I’m not sure anyone left the theater with dry eyes. Up is pretty loved, but mostly because of the first 20 minutes. I liked Elio more than most people seemed to have; I’m considering an effortpost review since it came up.

Soul and Turning Red (never saw that one) I guess are like that, but less about a world and more about a transformation? Not considered Pixar’s best.

There are also the “non-humans as a human allegory,” like Cars, A Bug’s Life, Onward, Elemental. These are, at best, controversial. I think humans need to be in a Pixar movie, but not as the main characters.

I never saw Lightyear, and I think that was their worst ever concept for a film. I hated that they made a 3d Pixar movie as the in-universe buzz lightyear movie; I prefer the original 2d galactic command TV show. Toy advertisement media is far more silly and zany than a Pixar film.

Pixar is at their best when we get to imagine non-humans “inside” our world and what they might think of us. If I were an exec, I would be demanding that creatives pitch more of those ideas.

Luca, Brave, Up, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world.

I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical -- it needed more songs, and the relationship with her mother was a bit off somehow; she needed to talk with her great great grandmother, spinning the threads of fate up in the tower or something. Old Disney might have integrated some actual Scottish fairy tales, which were my absolute favorites growing up. The Golden Key is especially excellent.

Personally, I usually enjoy the Disney musicals more in general -- Encanto and Moana were quite fun (though I hear Wish fell flat, and haven't bothered watching it).

It would probably have worked to make a Pixar version of Stitch, that could be a lot of fun -- make it like Monsters inc, with more emphasis on Stitch and the aliens.

I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical

I actually forgot until I wrote the post and looked at a filmography list that Brave wasn't a princess film made by Disney Animation and not Pixar.

A Bug’s Life

I mean, it's Seven Samurai, but bugs. Well animated for the time, decent humour and voices, and also (and possibly more importantly at the time!) better than the coincidentally competing AntZ. The writing wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was solid, and I'll happily rewatch it.

A Bug’s Life

I mean, it's Seven Samurai, but bugs. Well animated for the time, decent humour and voices, and also (and possibly more importantly at the time!) better than the coincidentally competing AntZ. The writing wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it was solid, and I'll happily rewatch it.

Antz was a much better movie than A Bug's Life.

A Bug's Life, as you said, is fundamentally just a remake of Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, toned down for little kids. Antz is clever, original, and very much not toned down. The termite battle is basically the insect version of Saving Private Ryan's beach scene. Z and Weaver have actual sexual tension with Bala and Azteca, respectively, as opposed to the chaste romance between Flik and Atta. Antz deals with military coups and genocide; A Bug's Life deals with learning to stand up to your bullies.

Antz is a movie everyone can enjoy; A Bug's Life is a movie meant for small children.

+1 for Antz.

I think a Bug's Life is more cohesive as a movie, actually, but it's far, far less interesting and subversive. Some of it is unfortunately visuals; the character designs in Antz were just kind of less pleasant to look at than Pixar's approved and focustested shapes, and that kind of serves as a metaphor for the differences between the two movies.

+1 for Antz superiority, and fond memories of my father helpfully pointing out to me that Gene Hackman's character was a Nazi.

I haven’t seen either in a very, very long time but if memory serves Antz was also more interested in using actual facts about ants to set up its world. Building tunnels and fighting with termites and all that.

I do remember preferring Antz as a kid, or at least I have a stronger memory of it, probably in large part because of the action scenes.

More comments

A Bug’s Life was good, but I think the insect-oriented concept repelled people and it didn’t do well. I don’t consider it one of their best, but I enjoyed it.

I also put Cars in that category, and I do like Cars, but I don’t think it represented the best that Pixar can offer in terms of concept. But it was well-executed, and has attained iconic status, and sells merchandise better than Toy Story! I think if Pixar makes another movie as compelling as Cars, it would be good. Like Coco, it’s a situation where Pixar expressed its creative strength outside its core conceit.

I also forgot about The Good Dinosaur — which even though I’ve seen it I don’t have any idea what it was about.

Coco is about a living human exploring the world of the dead. I would argue that it fits the pattern. You just have to remove the requirement that the fish-out-of-water character be nonhuman.

I'm particularly annoyed by the decline within the John Wick franchise.

The first movie? Goes hard. Taut cinematography, pacing, and music. The bathhouse shootout still gives me bumps. A+. It even manages to stay somewhat grounded, allowing for the Secret Assassins stuff.

And then it goes downhill from there. Half the population of New York shot dead with no repercussions. The lore getting ever more convoluted while simultaneously becoming nonsensical. The fight scenes got way worse.

The last mainline JW movie I saw, which must have been number 4, I gave up on halfway through. When the story wants me to believe that a blind man somehow manages to be a dangerous assassin on part with John Wick, I fucking give up. The man uses a katana most of the time. Has nobody tried shooting him from more than 20 meters away? How is he not hard countered by a JBL speaker blasting Fetty Wap?

It's no surprise I barely watch movies these days.

I am happy to see this same take I have expressed in the wild, though you feel stronger than I do. I think the first one was definitely the strongest, with everything afterwards having some Marvel-like quality about them, but still with pretty decent action scenes, usually with some stupid gimmick.

It's too bad you hated them enough to stop watching them. I wanted to ask what you thought about the flamethrower fight in Ballerina. I thought it was dumb as hell, but everyone around me and everyone online said that it was awesome. It had a bunch of other problems, too, if you ask me.

It seems to me that every JW flick increasingly flanderized the core conceit to the point of self-parody. It would be sorta acceptable if the choreography kept up, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they started running on water and throwing qi balls at people.

I gave up on Chapter 4 before the bit with the Dragon's Breath rounds, presuming that's the right movie (even 2 and 3 are so forgettable that I genuinely can't be sure), but a fucking flamethrower?? That's so absurd that it loop around to being worth watching, in a so bad it's good fashion.

I didn't have any plans of watching the Ballerina, I have cynical views on the fates of franchises that seek to replace an existing character with a Strong Independent Female Lead, but perhaps I'll save it for when I get badly stoned and manage to switch my brains off.

Nvm, faceh said what I was going to say below. Still totally understand where you're coming from though.

4 is indeed the one with the Dragon's Breath rounds. It was featured in a really popular no-cut scene that drew a lot of inspiration from Hotline Miami with its top-down camera view. The visual of John Wick shooting a shotgun at enemies who would blow up in flames was pretty cool, but definitely highly overrated, with the top-down view basically negating the benefit of a no-cut scene which is usually supposed to give a visceral, exciting sense of actually being there in the middle of the action.

I'd say you didn't miss much by missing that, but you did miss the best scene of the film, the long take of John Wick being kicked and rolling down several flights of stairs (the actual gun combat scene surrounding that was pretty meh).

Yes, actually 4 is the one I remember the most because of the stairs part. Sorry, that's just awesome. I did also like the top-down thing because I quite like Hotline Miami. I have now defaulted to assuming most of the things shown in John Wick are not true to life, so the Dragon's Breath stuff doesn't bother me much.

Frankly, I will probably see about every John Wick related film for the foreseeable future, because my family likes to see it, and I still think the action is decent enough. Far above pretty much anything else, anyway. My real preference is for high stakes, high lethality stuff, like the hotel shootout in No Country or the crazy car chase scene in The French Connection.

I would have to try very hard to suspend my disbelief, my understanding is that DB rounds are borderline useless in real life! But the idea of seeing Keanu break his hips rolling down a flight of stairs has some appeal haha.

I thought it was dumb as hell, but everyone around me and everyone online said that it was awesome.

Well, there's the whole problem expressed by OP in a nutshell.

Writing doesn't have to be 'good' if people are that easily impressed and don't think about it too hard.

When the story wants me to believe that a blind man somehow manages to be a dangerous assassin on part with John Wick, I fucking give up. The man uses a katana most of the time.

I have not watched John Wick 4, but that does sound like something Keanu Reeves would have asked to put in the movie, as a direct hommage to Zatoichi.

There was a discussion here recently about whether it was better to immerse yourself in the world of fiction or to be analytical of it. Personally, I think both are worthwhile, and the best works manage to give a good time to both modes of media consumption. Probably that inclusion was meant more for people who analyse the movie than those who want to believe in it.

I'll give you though that the John Wick movies have gotten steadily worse with each one, and I think it's for the simple reason that studio execs don't have restraint and cannot accept that perhaps sometimes you should not give what the public begs for.

The first movie's story was great because of how little they went into the assassin society stuff. It's there, but it's not the main thrust of the movie, it makes the movie feel richer by being hinted at. By the third movie, that's all there is left. Mystery is like spices in cooking. You put a bit of spices in your meal to make it taste better, you shouldn't just shovel spoonfuls of spices into your mouth. John Wick 2 was an overly spiced meal; still a meal, but they should have cut down on the spices. John Wick 3 was like shoveling spoonfuls of spices.

The bulletproof suit enables lazy writing.

I'd call myself a gun nerd, and I'd say that the first John Wick treated firearms with respect. It all went downhill there after.

I don't care what your "bulletproof" suit is made of, if it's any durable fiber I'm aware of, it's not going to stand up to rifle caliber rounds. Kevlar? Aramid? Not happening. Not without looking more like a bomb suit with plate inserts, at the very least.

Guns became a matter of convenience later on. At just about the same point the blind assassin was up to his nonsense, you had bows and arrows versus guns. What.

Right now, it seems that John only gets hurt when it suits the plot. He doesn't feel like an ultra-lethal human operating within range of plausibility, he's just a superhuman with chronic constipation, which is why he doesn't seem to enjoy his prowess.

The choreography also went to hell. Everyone stands around waiting for John to act, more often than not. That visceral sense of fear, the impression that John was going up against competent foes and beating them through sheer skill? Gone.

That visceral sense of fear, the impression that John was going up against competent foes and beating them through sheer skill? Gone.

I mean, being fair, at this point a competent foe would have a small army of snipers watching out for John. And might just fire a grenade launcher at him if he shows up (it almost worked the first time they tried it). So there has to be some kind of suspension of disbelief or unspoken code for the fights to unfold the way they do.

I do really find it annoying that the first movie basically made him an ultra-capable one-man-army in a relatively grounded criminal underworld, but as that criminal underworld was expanded, it became WAY less grounded. And so did John's capabilities.

By the third it is implied that "The Table" functionally runs the world?

I dunno. I like the smaller scale ideas like the Continental being a sacred space where ceasefire is enforced, high class gun and clothing stores in major cities that specialize in outfitting assassins, and the local cops being clued in/on the payroll, which helps explain why they don't interfere when stuff pops off.

Basically, the very concept of John Wick works best in a world where criminals/crime syndicates have a heavily enforced honor code, but are also constantly fighting with each other and stay completely in the shadows, vs. going balls to the wall in a busy street. Simple fridge logic: why the fuck don't the bystanders in cars just STOP when they see a shootout occurring? Also applies to people who keep dancing in a nightclub while men are being slaughtered with axes all around.

Anyway yeah. I will defend the series pretty heavily, but it now operates almost entirely on "rule of cool."

I really have to wonder how much they're paying for more and more hitmen to crawl out of the woodwork, after John has already racked up triple digit kill counts over the last movie. All the monetary rates I can remember being quoted seemed grossly inadequate, I'd rather go work at a fast-food chain for minimum wage if the risk premium is that poor.

(I grant that the franchise runs on ROC. But there's only so much I can suspend my disbelief before it breaks my neck with it)

Far be it from me to criticize the economics of an action film, but yeah, there genuinely CANNOT be enough contract killings needed in this world to justify the number of assassins that populate New York.

I can imagine that intergang warfare flares up from time to time which requires hiring on more talent, but if most of them have enough downtime to just hang out in the city, and need money badly enough to go after the most feared killer alive, there must not be much else going on between gang wars.

And it would nice to portray an assassin who sees the contract to take out John, looks at the monetary amount, shakes his head, and goes back to his crosswords b/c screw that.

My headcanon is that "The Table" gets involved in international politics by taking contracts from nation-states to kill elites/politicians/businessmen in other countries and this is where most of the money in the assassin economy comes from, and the main reason they maintain such strict procedures and rules, so that various governments 'trust' them to keep things orderly and in exchange, tolerate their existence rather than declare war on them.

There's literally nothing shown in the movies to corroborate this, of course.

I expect John Wick, Chapter 5: Head Cannon to come out. Featuring Keanu Reeves, and a .22lr pistol strapped to his skull. That's about the only uncharted territory left.

Might I make a suggestion:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iGpZ9xaQLYQ?si=SHm5raEAkD18v4fD

Thats the one addition I simply cannot defend. If he can tuck his head behind the suit and be instantly bulletproof (regardless of the weapons being used against him) then whats the risk?

Also, given the falls he survives in 3 and 4, it seems that the bulletproof-ness applies to all impact. I was actually reminded somewhat of the Die Hard franchise, where John McClane went from a competent off-duty cop barely making it out of his depth in 1 to a Marvel superhero taking down a fighter jet with a Mack truck followed by surviving sliding down a crumbling bridge in 4. Hollywood might have somewhat of an issue with making everything bigger and more over-the-top with sequels.

(1) Our attention spans have been shot by media; we're accustomed to everything from video (old fashioned tape) to videos (e.g. Youtube) to streaming where we can fast-forward to The Good Bits and skip all the boring talky parts

(2) Because of that, modern scripts have to be full of The Good Bits to hold our goldfish-attention spans, that's why when you watch the trailers now you more or less have seen the movie because they put a lot of The Good Bits into the trailers to grab our attention and make us want to see the movie

(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers. They treat every episode like a mini-movie, so there's little development of plot and characters flowing on from one episode to the next (and that gives us things like 'in this episode Galadriel is threatening to commit war crimes in her pursuit of revenge, in the following episode she is preaching about revenge bad') and plenty of pointless activity (what did Isildur wandering around actually achieve? nothing, but hey we got a Cool Fight* with a bog monster)

  • It was not a Cool Fight, it was embarrassing for all concerned, including the bog monster

I mentioned before that my mother once said to me that she finds herself enjoying movies and TV shows that aren't in English more than ones that are. Why? Because if it's not in English, she has to give the show her full attention to read the subtitles. If it's in English, she can spend half the movie looking at her phone. Netflix are acutely aware of the "second screen" phenomenon and have urged screenwriters not to bank on the audience's undivided attention, and to stuff their scripts with lazy expository dialogue so that audiences can still follow the plot even if they're watching "Family Guy funny moments" or similar on their phone at the same time.

I wonder if this is a big part of why (per the OP) modern movie writing is so bad - if the screenwriters are thinking to themselves "well, this is a boring talky scene, where people will be staring at their phones. Even if I do my best to make the expository dialogue realistic, lively and entertaining in its own right, no one's going to look up at the screen until something explodes, so why bother putting in the effort?"

Some touring musicians are insisting on audiences putting their smartphones into little black bags which they can collect at the end of the gig because they hate performing in front of a sea of people on their smartphones. I would happily pay an extra euro for a phone-free cinema screening, and I reckon that, while people would initially grumble about it, they'd most likely end up enjoying the movie a lot more.

The smartphone is truly the worst invention in human history.

Future generations will dig up Steve Jobs's corpse and mount his head on a pike.

That's always been the case for TV - script writers were encouraged to write plots that a woman preparing dinner could follow along with. It's actually decreased somewhat - now we have "prestige TV" and podcasts have taken over the niche of "Give Mom's brain something to think about while doing mindless repetitive task."

True. I get the impression that this tendency is bleeding over from soap operas into ostensibly prestige television and standalone films, two media in which the audience's undivided assumption was traditionally assumed.

spend half the movie looking at her phone

That's absolutely a problem with audiences today, and part of the reason our attention spans and focus are so frayed. And yeah, the writers have to compensate for "if we don't keep the action moving, we won't keep eyeballs on the screen".

I was going to answer OP’s question with a tinfoil-hat rant about screenwriters being hired out of crony/nepotism rather than talent, but your complaint about the audience rings true (too?).

Not me, of course, but yes, other people. Anecdote: I have a zoomer significant other. Last night, she suggested we watch an episode of The Bear, a show of which we have both watched and enjoyed the previous 3 seasons, and are now midway through season 4. The episodes are only 33 minutes long.

My idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: sit down and watch the show, giving it your full concentration. Her idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: be scrolling through Instagram constantly during all those 33 minutes, occasionally flicking her eyeballs to the TV during the 0.5 seconds in between reels.

And she’s the one who pays for the Disney+ subscription we’re watching it on. So… kind of a waste of money to make your show coherent when even your paying customers who proactively decide to watch the show don’t even actually process it into their brains.

Is this her?

Though I suppose it could always be worse...

It's shocking how both the depth and breadth of knowledge have contracted in one generation. Recently I was sitting around a fire with a group of 20 somethings and they asked me what kind of music I liked. I told them "classical" and they didn't know what that meant. Worse still, I had a hard time explaining it. One of the most alien and disconcerting things is that Millenials will text while having sex. I now give a standard warning to Millenials: "No texting during sex or we are done. I don't care how hot you are." This makes the hikikomori seem much more understandable.

I told them "classical" and they didn't know what that meant.

I don't actually know how I'd define classical without mentioning names, and time periods. What makes a piece of "classical" music just that? I know it when I hear it, but I can't define Beethoven vs. Modern Piano piece in a way that's actually a legitimate definition.

Jokes on them, this is my fetish

/r/BorednIgnored (NSFW)

One of the most alien and disconcerting things is that Millenials will text while having sex. I now give a standard warning to Millenials: "No texting during sex or we are done. I don't care how hot you are."

Ted_Kaczynski_mugshot.jpeg

My idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: sit down and watch the show, giving it your full concentration. Her idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: be scrolling through Instagram constantly during all those 33 minutes, occasionally flicking her eyeballs to the TV during the 0.5 seconds in between reels.

Off topic, but have you ever taken her to a few week long camping trip, somewhere far outside cell coverage? How do you think she'd react?

Nothing against your GF, but these kinds of description of GenZ / GenAlpha awaken a feeling existential dread in me, and I wonder if there's anything that can be done to help them / avert the apocalypse.

How do you think she'd react?

Her phone being nearly out of battery is an automatic “OK let’s go home now”. My phone being nearly out of battery (and me being unbothered about it) results in her looking at me nonplussed and asking me if I’m OK every 5 minutes.

So I don’t think it’d go down so well.

I know we recently had our disagreements about the future impact of technology on human brains, but for what it's worth, @Butlerian's description also fills me with a profound despair.

(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers.

Studios often seem to go for relatively inexperienced writers and directors which I suppose makes sense if you have idiotic inclusion standards like Disney or need to have an all-powerful producer like Kevin Feige but just seems baffling for a vanity project/streaming tentpole like Rings of Power.

People seem to love Tony Gilroy's Andor, so maybe that's going to change.

Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap

The Zach Snyder DC movies are good actually. People love to hate on Lex Zuckerberg for some reason. Maybe because every line he speaks sounds like a cheesy villain monologue, but that’s the point. Killing Superman is less fulfilling than making Superman read your tweets and watching him squirm because he doesn’t have a good response.

Batman vs. Superman was originally going to be much longer (possibly two parts) and Jared Leto’s Joker was going to be in it. When they truncated it they cut the Joker and ended up just giving a lot of his lines to Lex Luther. Because of this, Eisenberg’s Luther comes off less cold and calculating and much more overtly unhinged than most portrayals of the character. Which is why I think a lot of people didn’t like it.

The problem with Snyder is that he takes two hits to make an okay movie. If every Snyder-fan defense is "watch the extended cut" then he's just awful as a theatrical director.

I think Man of Steel in particular was overly maligned for some of Snyder's choices (I'm just not wedded to Superman not killing), but the fact that everything he's done since has faced more or less the same reaction as BvS and his best works are things like 300 and Dawn of the Dead where he didn't have script control is telling. He was promoted way outside of his competence when he became the architect of the DCEU.

In the source material Superman is esoterically Jewish-coded and Lex Luthor is Aryan-coded. Zach Snyder reversed this in his interpretation of Superman, but it looks like James Gunn's interpretation will be closer to the dynamic in the source material.

Superman was created by Jews, so it's not surprising if there are elements of Jewishness to him. I don't really see much that is specifically Jewish about him, though. For example, the notion of "really powerful being who is orphaned in a foreign culture and has to discover the powers he has by virtue of his birth" has as many examples in European cultures as it does in Semitic cultures. Kal-El does sound Hebrew, but that's a minor thing. What kinds of Jewish-coded characteristics do you have in mind?

The names of mythological heroes are quite important in understanding their esoteric meaning. Kal-El doesn't just sound Hebrew, El is one of the names used to describe the Jewish God in the Hebrew Bible. Jerry Siegel gives his superhero the "Kryptonian" name Kal-El meaning "Voice of God" in Hebrew. In contrast, Lex Luthor has a German surname.

The mythological impetus for Superman was to help guide a new 20th century morality for America. Superman was a moral leader, explained well by Rolling Stone magazine:

To our ears, fighting for “truth, justice, and the American Way” may sound like old-fashioned patriotism. But in the 1940s, it was controversial.

In fact, looking back on those early days, Superman was very woke. He was known as the “Champion of the Oppressed.” At a time when Republicans opposed President Roosevelt’s liberal programs and opposed entering World War II, Superman supported — in comic books and on a wildly successful radio program — the New Deal, open immigration, and entering the war against Hitler. Some episodes of the radio show lampooned the KKK.

Indeed, in 1940, Nazi propaganda accused Superman of being a Jewish conspiracy to poison the minds of American youth.

Of course, after Pearl Harbor, American sentiment changed, and Superman became a national hero, not only fighting Nazis in the comic books but with his image emblazoned on tanks and planes. At first, however, he was a progressive — even a radical.

And of course, Superman was also an immigrant. As Schwartz puts it in his book, “he is the ethnic guy with the Hebraic name Kal-El who came to America, changed his mannerisms and appearance. He tucks his tallit [Jewish prayer shawl, but Schwartz means Superman’s costume] down into his suit, and he goes around the world like a gentile. So it’s sort of like the ultimate assimilation/assertion fantasy, the ability to decide which part of you should interact with society at any given moment. What is more American than being an ethnic immigrant, and bringing the gifts and uniqueness of your cultural heritage to the greater benefit of the American society?”

The principal writer of the Superman comic book series from 1971 through 1986, Elliot Maggin, affirms that interpretation as well:

The unwarranted assumption in the explanations above is that Kryptonians are not Jews. I dissent from that notion. While they are not direct descendents of the Judeans of the Middle East from whom the term "Jewish" comes, I always ascribed effectively Jewish doctrine and ritual to the Kryptonian tradition. In fact, the Kryptonian tradition is congruent with and certainly predates the Judean, so they have at least as much claim to the tradition as any of us.

I give all my characters religions, so I've thought this through - really. The kents are Methodist (as is Clark), Lois is Catholic, Perry is Baptist, Jimmy is Lutheran (no surprise there) and Bruce Wayne and Batman are both Episcopalian (even less of a surprise there). And Superman (like the Siegels, the Shusters, the Weisingers, the Schwartzes, the Maggins and the Luthors) is Jewish.

This is so self-evident that it may as well be canon.

Superman as a Jewish-coded hero leading humanity against Aryan-coded villains expresses as some of the earliest, viral anti-racism in American popular culture.

In contrast to Superman, Lex Luthor is a villain with a German surname "whose hatred of Superman is more due to a xenophobic dislike of an alien being held in higher regard than himself." As Eisenberg said "Luthor is a classic bigot: He feels [Superman] is not like us, he doesn’t belong here.”

It's much more than simply a name, Superman is a figment of a Jewish self-conception of Jewish dual identity and role as moral leaders in Gentile society. That is the esoteric motivation for these mythological heroes.

Zach Snyder sort of inverted things with Henry Cavill as Superman and Eisenberg as Luthor, with Snyder's Luthor expressing widely noted Jewish traits. We like to complain about fictional characters being race-swapped as being "woke", and that's true, but at the same time it's always been a feature of mythology portrayed over time. Of the original meaning of the characters though there's little doubt.

Rolling Stone also recognizes James Gunn casting a Jewish actor to play Superman as significant for those reasons:

David Corenswet may be the first Jewish actor to play Superman, but the Man of Steel himself is as Jewish as matzo ball soup.

As you may or may not know, Superman debuted in 1938, the creation of two American Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. But that authorship is just the beginning. In fact, the entire Superman myth is an American-Jewish fantasy, lifted from numerous Jewish legends and fulfilling the dream of revenge against Hitler.

Come and learn, people.

First there’s the name. The -El surnames of Superman’s Kryptonian family is a Hebrew appellation for God...

More deeply, though, as Roy Schwartz detailed in his rather awfully-titled book Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero, Superman’s origin story is a lot like that of the Biblical Moses: sent away by his parents in a desperate attempt to escape certain death, he is raised among humans, but learns that he is not one of them at all, but has a greater destiny in store. His mini-spaceship is even like the little ark that carried Moses down the River Nile...

But not only cool. As is well known, Nietzsche’s theories of the superman were co-opted by the Nazis, who depicted themselves as inherently superior, the “master race.” Siegel and Schuster’s reclaiming of the term “superman” is itself an act of revenge — as is, of course, Superman’s primary occupation in those early years: namely, kicking the crap out of Nazis. Which is all he did, all the time. He mocked them, beat them, blew them up. He was a Jewish revenge fantasy writ large, and colored in red, yellow, and blue...

As the decades went on, Superman’s Jewishness was a kind of on-again, off-again affair. In the 1970s, lead writer Elliot Maggin incorporated elements of the Bible, Jewish history, and even Kabbalah into Superman’s own story and described his Jewishness as “canon.” There’s a Passover Seder in Superman #400 (1984), Superman defends the Warsaw Ghetto in a time-travel plot from a 1998 issue, and there are references to Jewish angels and magical lore. And in the film Superman II (1980), an old lady exclaims, after Supe rescues a boy from Niagara Falls, “What a nice man! Of course he’s Jewish!” ...

So, sure, it’s exciting to have an actual MOT (“Member of the Tribe”) in the Superman role, not to mention with Lois Lane played by Rachel Brosnahan, who is not Jewish by birth or religion but who is an honorary Jew for her years on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. While one day, it would be great to have a non-white actor in the role, it’s nice to have a Jewish actor play a role that owes so much to the American Jewish experience. I can only hope that his new Superman brings back the courageous, progressive decency of the original one. We need that now more than ever.

...does it count that he's a journalist?

A little bit, but I doubt it's very significant. Granted, I don't know much about the comics, but from what little exposure I have to Superman, I've never seen any reason to think that the way Superman behaves as a journalist is particularly Jewish. If an Irish-American guy wrote a story about a space alien who comes to Boston and becomes a cop, I wouldn't view the cop as particularly Irish-coded unless he did, well, Irish-y things as a cop. But like I said, I don't know much about the comics, so I could be missing something.

The first era of movies from 1900 to 1977 were inspired by real life, Vaudeville acts, stage plays, folklore and novels, and other visual arts like painting, still photography and comics. The second era of movies from 1977 to 1995 were inspired by older movies. The third era from 1995 to 2007 were inspired by movies inspired by older movies. The modern era of movies from 2007 to today are inspired by movies inspired by movies inspired by movies. It’s a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, and it’s getting pretty faint.

I haven't seen the last Jurassic Park, for reasons (cw: crude joke song), but the last one I did watch made ARK look like the height of skilled literature. Not because the CGI physics were any less realistic than WildCardPhysics, because hell no, or even because of good writing, because also hell no. Yet people were doing things! With actual motivations! And reasons to believe that their actions derived from those motivations, in ways that someone in the real world might even do. We're grading on a pretty steep scale, here -- ARK includes an NPC that injects Molten Science into his Veins to Become As A God (and is a not-very-subtle-critic of the british scientist) and another that basically does the same thing by accident, and players whose motivations often are little more than 'make a nice base' or 'beat the ark guardian' or 'wrongly believes something will work' or 'troll as many other players as possible without being too annoying' -- but compared to Brave or Mufasa it might as well be Shakespeare.

I've seen furry porn artists who've written scifi comics where the main characters spend almost the entire comic with their junks out, and still have more compelling characterization and plot!

And that's just bizarre. I don't expect blockbusters to be good or smart. I don't even expect them to avoid the various headscratchers or plotholes; cinemasins are actively obnoxious to me. It's somewhat understandable for something like The Lego Movie to have random asspulls or a main character that's an idiot. Why is the same true for the newer Alien movies? Why does the teenager -- or the adults! -- in the Beetlejuice sequel seem dumber and more cartoonish than Emet from Lego Movie, or sometimes even the same character in the original?

There's some economics arguments for why the writing and character points end up so bad so often, even when better choices are available even in the same movie, and there's some process-style arguments that having to start work on the major CGI-heavy shots early and separate from the writing team gives stories a glued-together feeling, but I dunno. It's not universal. There are CGI-heavy, or modern-economics-driven, or works that aren't aiming for the international market, or works focused on action, or even politically woke stories that still work as stories. Fanlore says Zahn supposedly offered to write the Sequel Trilogy for Star Wars. It's interesting to think about how much difference that would involve, even if executives insisted using the same characters and same major plot beats, but it's just as plausible we'd have a great script and an awful set of movies anyway.

Wasn't the last Alien movie decent? The one where it was a bunch of teenagers trying to make it off a colony by looting a space station? I don't recall any obvious idiot-balls being kicked around, though, to be fair, I have very low expectations after the first Prometheus.

Alien: Romulus is excellent.

After the previous two turds I did bother watching that one. I'll give it a look.

Totally different director, totally different vibe. Prometheus and Covenant were "in the universe" but weren't really Alien movies, Romulus is very, very much an Alien movie.

Romulus was good...except for the groan-worthy mandatory fan-service.

I haven't seen Romulus, yet, and can only judge Prometheus and Covenant. Covenant wasn't as bad as Prometheus from an idiot ball perspective, though it had its stinkers, but if anything it managed to be worse about characterization. It's bad enough in Prometheus where the original 'androids can be asshole because they get bad or contradictory orders' had merged into just 'all androids are assholes', but in Covenant several of the demonstrated-by-five-seconds-later-gore human characters also seem like bizarre robots for all their reactions or motivations are shown.

I absolutely fucking hated Prometheus, but to my surprise, I did mostly like Covenant.

It had some major stinkers, like the captain following an android he knows to be evil and then inspecting an alien egg face-first. Or the general lack of PPE. That crew was so allergic to the concept of masking that you'd have thought the movie was shot during COVID.

Yet the movie had a vibe, and the action was great. Some of the ideas were even cool! That's far more than can be said about Prometheus.

(Give Romulus a watch, I enjoyed it)

Wasn't the last Alien movie decent? The one where it was a bunch of teenagers trying to make it off a colony by looting a space station?

So bad I couldn't finish it even when I was just watching it on the bike trainer.

So it's the intersection of a few things.

The first major one is overspecialization in our society.

The typical person writing modern movies was super into pop culture in high school. Then they went to film school and studied screenwriting. Then they tried to break into the industry.

As a result they have very little life experience outside of school and Hollywood. They haven't even read a lot of fiction recreationally. There's a joke that comic book movies got so popular because nobody in Hollywood will read anything without pictures.

With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.

As a metaphor lets talk about being a commercial illustrator at an ad agency. It's a perfectly good career, but anyone talented should really dream of being a fine artist when applying to schools as a HS grad. Some people have even made the jump from commercial illustrator to fine artist, like Banksy. Similarly going straight into screenwriting shows a lack of love for the best examples of writing.

The next problem is the schools themselves. They have the same problem as architecture schools, where what the schools teach students to value isn't popular with the general public.

Basically all screenwriting grads want to write Barry. A fine show, but it's not for everyone.

Next by their nature a large production is a mix of interest and opinions. Disney makes a lot of their money off of merchandising. They care more about toy sales than having a plot that makes sense. Additionally people at the studio like to get their ideas in for ego reasons.

Mufasa specifically was probably seen as a cash grab movie. The writers and the studio just wanted to get it out and get their money.

DC movies are interesting because the live action movies are just seen as cash grabs for Warner Bros. They want merch money to spend on the movies they care about.

The DC animated movies are different. For western animators who want to do action adventure movies they are some of the most exciting jobs to work on. So they attract top talent who want to make them good.

There's also just a highly chaotic aspect to making a live action movie. Things like casting affect the script but are entirely out of the writers control, so there are always last minute rewrites, then the director shoots what he thinks he needs, then they have to edit together a movie out of whatever was shot.

With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.

I've got an idea swirling around in my head about how the draft is necessary(not sufficient) for a free, western society, in a way that goes back to the beginning of time. I think mass culture is just one expression thereof.

I floated the idea of national service - not necessarily in the military - back at the subreddit and was told it was tantamount to slavery, so you'll need to consider the question of how is it a "free" society if "slavery" is a necessary part.

I've got an idea swirling around in my head about how the draft is necessary(not sufficient) for a free, western society, in a way that goes back to the beginning of time. I think mass culture is just one expression thereof.

The period where the Anglosphere countries had a peacetime draft was very short (20-30 years after WW2) and coincided with a low point for freedom. The model of democracy that emerges from the French Revolution was based on the idea that democracy (which is related to, but not the same as, freedom) requires a draft, although empirically that has turned out to be false in a number of Continental European countries including France. But I don't think France is noted for having more freedom than the Anglosphere.

I would be very interested to read that if you ever do a write up.

Mufasa was one of the worst movies I've ever watched. Not only is the plot awful, the cinematography is also bad. Ain't nobody ever made a movie where every single shot in the entire movie is a panning shot.

It's strange to me that anyone wouldn't get extreme uncanny valley vibes from films involving photorealistic anthropomorphic animals.

Ain't nobody ever made a movie where every single shot in the entire movie is a panning shot.

Has Ken Burns ever made a "feature" documentary?

My maximum charitable take is that they're just giving audiences the thing they've shown they want.

I model most movies along three axes for what justifies said movie's existence and creates the appeal to the audience.

They can be plot driven; They can be action driven; They can be character driven.

Or often, some combination of all 3.

Character driven means we get engaged with a unique/interesting character, who is put into certain situations, has a certain arc, and comes out changed in some way. The plot doesn't have to make sense, we're mostly just focused on seeing the character's reaction to what's happening, how they interact with other characters, and the lessons they learn by the end. Writing needs to be good, but mostly in terms of dialogue, giving the character(s) a recognizable voice and appropriately comedic or dramatic lines.

Action driven, we're there to see a spectacle, the plot is mostly there to set up scenarios for the action, and if the action is sensational enough the audience doesn't notice or forgives plot holes or crappy writing. You write your character some pithy one-liners and give enough of a skeleton of a plot to move things along. Choreography matters a lot more here.

Plot driven, though... we're there for an interesting story. Entertaining events, surprising twists, revelations, and a satisfying conclusion are mandatory. If the twist doesn't land, if there's noticeable holes in the plot, if there's too many boring scenes, it fails. If your audience is watching because they're "invested in the plot" and REALLY want to see where it goes, you have to make it work the entire time, and pay off effectively. In this case, the writing pretty much HAS to be solid, minimal/no plot holes, AND you have to keep your characters acting consistently.

What Hollywood appears to have noticed is that general audiences mostly prefer character and action driven vehicles... and care very little about purely plot-driven ones, where the story, not the characters, is the central draw.

I'd blame it on Marvel, to some extent. People show up to watch Thor or Iron Man or Starlord get into crazy shenanigans, with a big, splashy action fight scene at the climax to justify the cost of the ticket.

If you give them their beloved characters, and give them a pulse-pounding action sequence or two, most audiences will give it a thumbs up. They won't analyze the plot threads or question the film's logic or pick apart character motivations too much. So why bother giving them a tight, logical, completely unique story?

And its much, much easier to write stories for such films, where you don't have to make the plots completely coherent, just make your audience 'have fun' and you're golden.

So I think plot just falls by the wayside, and Hollywood optimizes for putting well-liked characters on screen and making up crazy scenarios to put them in, motivation or logical sense be damned.

Which sucks as one of the admittedly minority people who loves a juicy, well written, or unpredictable plot. Why I love for example in the book world the Scarlet Letter, otherwise a bit pedestrian. It has some great dramatic timing. Also, good characters play make plot easier, but good characters are harder to write and act than most people realize.

Sadly plot also requires you to pay attention and the dirty secret is that many viewers regardless of age range don’t want to sit through a whole movie and pay attention the whole time. Also most plot devices take a little time to get the first payoff. So if the other aspects of the film fall flat in the first half hour, you lose the chance, even if the plot is actually great.

And finally rewrites can destroy plot very easily via death by a thousand cuts. Great plot takes discipline! You have to know when too much is too much, and when the subtle things matter, and need the power to keep a good script good. Honestly I think most original scripts if performed as written would do great! But more than 1 significant “filter” and it gets made bland or hollowed out quite easily.

The failure mode for plot-driven media is when the writer(s) are too in love with their own genius and spend so much time adding on baroque twirls (Christopher Nolan seems to be the exemplar of this, by what reviews I've read) that they disappear up their own spirals and leave the audience with an unsatisfactory experience. "The Usual Suspects" is a great movie, but once you know the twist at the end, there's not much more to it. Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle ("aha, there is the cup!" type of watching out for clues).

Juggling all three elements successfully is very difficult, pulling off two of them is probably more achievable, and it probably is easier to get characters + action to work than a combination like characters + plot or plot + action. I think this is why Hitchcock was so well-regarded as a director, he didn't pull it off every time, but he could manage to pull off plot + characters + action.

The Sting is one where I never spoil it for people, but despite being made of twists, I never tire of rewatching it.

The Sting

Redford and Newman, couldn't go wrong with that combo at that time. That's characters + plot meshing well.

Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle

I made the exact same comparison in my review of Memento, which is not a good movie. I think one of Nolan's major weaknesses is that he loves plots, but hates the fact that there have to be characters in them doing things.

Hitchcock and, later, Spielberg and James Cameron were my main thoughts on directors that could pull all three off.

Indiana Jones (the first 3) is the series the comes to mind as the paragon of balanced action-characters-plot, mixed to perfection.

I am thinking Braveheart. You care about William Wallace and Robert the Bruce.

The plot does drive the movie (along with certain twists, etc.).

And of course there’s some fun action.

Sadly plot also requires you to pay attention and the dirty secret is that many viewers regardless of age range don’t want to sit through a whole movie and pay attention the whole time.

Also likely true.

Teens and even many adults probably need some new stimuli every couple minutes if they're going to keep eyes on the screen. Remembering a subtle setup or vital piece of exposition that comes to a head in the 3rd act requires that they actually noticed it when it happened.

I'd guess that's why the Minecraft movie made so much money, just constant flood of stimulus after stimulus, don't need to care about any particular one, it won't come into play later.

To say nothing of the Super Mario Bros. movie, which I saw in theaters with friends, and the entire time I couldn't help myself thinking "okay, WHY do the blocks float and why are there random powerups hidden in them to give you special abilities? WHY does Kong society have an arena for gladiatorial combat? Why do they have dozens of go-karts, and why the hell does this rainbow road exist in the first place?"

I don't ask these questions about the video games! But the movie has the conceit of a plot... but I've literally never seen a plot that was more based on "something happens to move us to the next scene" and the movie just lacks any real connective tissue. Actually, the Deadpool and Wolverine Movie, which I also saw in theaters was also kind of like that. Probably the laziest setup for a 'final showdown' I've ever seen.

rewrites can destroy plot very easily via death by a thousand cuts. Great plot takes discipline!

Also solid point. Even a little bit of executive meddling can upset the delicately constructed but perfectly balanced plotline you established, and the the end product just seems like a mess. Much easier to disrupt a good plot than to build it.

To say nothing of the Super Mario Bros. movie

Not to be confused with the old movie, with the dinosaur evolution timeline dimension, which I actually quite enjoyed. Not because it was good cinema, Christ no. But I had a blast!

"something happens to move us to the next scene"

This link is broken, but I'm reminded of the way Dude, Where's My Car? literally yanks the main characters off the street multiple times to get them to the next scene. It depresses me to think that mainstream modern movies are now at the level of writing that powered a (classic) intentionally dumb comedy.

Fixed the link.

It's this one.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDWKRFSZlCM&t=64

This scene in the Mario Movie has NO REASON TO EXIST, they don't resolve anything, it lasts less than 2 minutes, there's no real danger, and they just solve the problem without even thinking about it, and get back to the storyline. Literally the next scene leads into the final showdown.

The whole movie feels like this.

I think writing in general, including novels has declined and in part I think it’s down to how we create writers. These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films) they are taught structures and methods, but because everyone is going to the same programs and learning the same methods and having the same experiences, there’s not much to draw on. So you get a lot of people writing without very much understanding of how people react in a given situation, and the dialogue sounds a bit off because the person that’s on the screen is someone’s blind guess at what a person like that is like.

That’s obviously wrong.

You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway. His whole cohort of Coppola and Spielberg and so on have similar stories.

Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films. Or branch out to weirdos like Hideo Kojima. It’s not like he had an exotic childhood. He just thought movies were cool, so he started writing something resembling screenplays.

George Lucas

I agree that George Lucas had not a wide variety of interesting life experiences, but I think illicit race car driving hobby that ended in nearly-fatal accident is plenty interesting, far more than run-of-the-mill sheltered millennial can boast of. But I agree his personal life experiences provided enough material for only one film (American Graffiti) which isn't bad but not the work Lucas is famous for.

I propose a synthesis: Great films require great directors, scriptwriters, actors, camera work, costumes, special effects, score. Some of those, I imagine, are skills someone can learn if he/she has the requisite talent and aptitude and opportunity to learn (such as in a film school). However, when it comes to the story elements and character portrayal, the film school can be beneficial but it is not the only nor the best source. School education has tendency to teach formulaic standards that please the professors. So it helps when the directors and scriptwriters can draw from real experiences- while it is not necessary if they can draw from imagination and someone else's real experiences. Likewise, it is not necessary but it helps when actors can do the same thing (during the filming of Lord of the Rings, Sir Christopher Lee corrected Peter Jackson on what kind of sound a man makes when he is stabbed in back. I doubt many actors today can claim similar knowledge.)

It is necessary that the scriptwriters are very good at writing, which requires superb talent or relentless practice and usually both.

In Star Wars the original trilogy we have a bit of both: Lucas draws not from personal biographical history but from previous films he saw as a kid that were more connected to reality and they had other writing talent and producers and directors. Star Wars (1977) is a collage of samurai epic, westerns, WW2 airplane action films, and Flash Gordon. When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation. Kurosawa's samurai films have a more tenuous connection to history, but it is a connection nevertheless, and as inspiration it was new to the US mass audience. Flash Gordon is work of imagination, but contributes the pulp setting and plot elements. Concerning the script-writing skill part, for The Empire Strikes Back, they brought in Leigh Brackett for the first draft, who had written countless amount of pulp space opera and screenplays for noir and John Wayne films, and later Lawrence Kasdan to polish the dialogue. For Indiana Jones, they had Lucas, Spielberg, and old adventure movie serials.

As an aside, Francis Ford Coppola is a great director who did nothing too exciting growing up, but one of his particular skills as director has been in choosing great occasionally high-brow script material. I don't think people today realize how many of his films are either directly based on or inspired best-seller novels. Everyone seems to know that Apocalypse Now is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam (and Joseph Conrad had plenty of varied life experience), but it is not as common knowledge that the Godfather was based on novel by Mario Puzo ("The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two year") who also wrote the script. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are novels by S. E. Hinton. Original inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula is, you know, in the title. I think the only film of his I've seen that is based on original script is The Conversation. In comparison, Spielberg appears to be a directorial wonderkid, winning competitions at age 13 and sneaking into Universal Studios as teenager.

The generation of film-makers today have two major endogenous weaknesses: Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars) and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had. Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too. DC and Marvel have been mostly successful at reanimation of decades-old characters and tropes.

Now I believe the weaknesses mentioned above would not be fundamental obstacles alone- the directors and scriptwriters could draw inspiration and verisimilitude from elsewhere if they had to, but then myriad of separate obstacles grind down that possibility: propensity to be blinded by activism; attention deficit among the audiences; economics influenced by streaming services; economics of producing CGI heavy blockbusters to sell toys and-or theme park rides; all sound plausible contributors to decline of the cinema.

Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars)

Right, I think this is a big part of it, but…

and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had.

No! Not with any consistency, at least. Maybe I’m just skeptical of the evergreen argument that the current generation is coddled and sheltered, but it just doesn’t add up. George had exactly the kind of wealthy educated youth that Maiq was complaining about. It even fits the theory about not understanding dialogue! But because he was successful, his life must have been interesting, must have been in some way better than those miserable PMCs.

I think that’s pretty silly. I think you could sample veteran directors at random and find plenty that had boring, upper-middle-class upbringings. Or pick a young one and find something at least as irresponsible as George’s hobby. Not do I think it would correlate very well with critical or audience success, because I think your other factors are carrying all the weight.

Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too.

This is really important. We have unprecedented access to the preserved corpses of existing projects. For the unimaginative, that’s a license to play it safe. Reboot the continuity and deploy a new line of toys. For the visionaries, though, having a rich world in which to play has its own advantages. We get commentary, metafiction, callbacks and fanservice. It’s opportunity. But it absolutely warps the market for intellectual property.

Entertainment is a commodity. You can’t sell Star Wars today because that spot is taken. You have to do something legally and perhaps even creatively distinct. Shot for shot remakes are a bizarre attempt to clear that bar. So are reboots. So are pivots to streaming, or AI, or whatever economic models promise market share without mining for good ideas.

The millennials barely even come into it.

When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation.

Hence all his military choreography looks like it's being acted out by aircraft, not spacecraft.

His trench run didn't have inherent verisimilitude because spacecraft really need to keep thrusting forward to maintain a constant velocity, it had relative verisimilitude because essentially none of the audience has an intuitive feeling for Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum, so "why don't Luke's wingmen just spin around and shoot back?" isn't a thought that we find unavoidable.

I wonder if some modern lack of relative verisimilitude is simply because we're a more culturally fractured society now. You still don't have an astronaut in the writers' room because there just aren't enough astronauts, but there's also lots of other occupations and activities and demographics that the writers room wants to write about (because they're interesting to watch), has no expertise with (because these days people with relevant experience are less likely to be acquainted with scriptwriters), but now gets burned by mistakes about (because lots of their intended audience is acquainted with those experiences).

It gets to the point where a little bit of realism can become a fun trope subversion in itself. When Sterling Archer has tinnitus or we see a montage explaining why Hawkeye is going deaf, seeing the reminder that guns and explosions are actually cripplingly loud is amusing, even to people who go to gun ranges and always wear ear protection, because seeing Hollywood get it right in fiction is a pleasant surprise.

You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway.

Your use of the singular indefinite article is very appropriate. George Lucas is capable of making a movie. As in, one. Which he did fifty years ago, which he's been coasting on ever since.

Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films.

I don't know if you have other people in mind of the same ilk as Wes Anderson, but as for the man himself, I've seen two of his movies and found them both insufferably annoying and precious throughout.

While I have a soft spot for Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m not really going to disagree. I got Anderson by randomly sampling 90s films. Here’s a few more:

  • Jumanji (1995). Written by Jonathan Hensleigh, a lawyer who got his start writing TV episodes. Directed by Joe Johnston, who studied special effects in college.
  • Men in Black (1997). Written by Ed Solomon, who studied economics but dabbled as a stand-up comedian. The jokes write themselves. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. I think the worldliness of his brief career in porn is counteracted by the fact it was photography.
  • Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Director James Foley, studied psychology and film. Writer David Mamet despite winning numerous awards, appears to have had a normal if liberal childhood in Chicago.

While I tried to pick a different movies, these were literally the first three I clicked.

I stand by my theory that getting a liberal arts degree, plus a film masters, has been pretty normal for decades. The view of writer or director as Romantic auteur is what the kids call “cope.”

I don't think your examples really support the argument you're making. @MaiqTheTrue's argument, as I understand it, was similar to one made by Kevin Mims here: writers in the past tended to have some kind of life experience outside of writing which they could draw on in order to tell compelling stories, whereas modern writers tend to study writing itself, and hence have nothing to draw on other than other stories they've read by other people, resulting in their novels/stories/screenplays giving the impression of palimpsest. I did not interpret their argument to mean that "if you have a liberal arts education, your stories will suck".

Per the narrative above, Jonathan Hensleigh obviously falls into the former category, not the latter: he practised law for seven years, unambiguously professional experience outside of writing itself. Likewise David Mamet: he variously worked as a busboy and taxi driver in Chicago (imagine the kinds of crazy characters he must have met) before taking up writing full-time. Ed Solomon I'll grant - but if your first example to illustrate your point that "you don't need life experience to tell a compelling story, you can just go straight into writing professionally" is the dude who wrote the Charlie's Angels adaptation and Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, it doesn't strike me as a terribly compelling one. (Obviously Solomon has written more commercially successful and critically well-received screenplays than those two, but it seems worth pointing out that the latter is widely considered one of the worst films ever made and one of the worst cinematic adaptations of a video game - and there is some seriously stiff competition for the latter accolade.)

So of the three examples you provided of successful Hollywood screenwriters, two of them did, in fact, have some kind of professional life experience outside of writing to draw on when writing their screenplays, which seems to affirm @MaiqTheTrue's point rather than contradict it.

I'll concede the point that studying film in college before going on to being a director seems to be a pretty normal career progression, and has been for decades - but given that this thread was about the poor standard of writing (as opposed to directing) in modern Hollywood films, that observation doesn't seem especially relevant. At no point did @MaiqTheTrue argue or even imply that films are worse now because directors study film in college instead of getting life experience first. While I don't doubt that having life experiences to draw on is valuable as a director, directing a film is an intrinsically more technical craft than writing one - the director needs to have at least a passing understanding of lighting, lenses, shutter speed, depth of field etc. in a way the screenwriter doesn't, and hence are well-served by studying these elements in a formal setting.

How am I supposed to interpret this, then?

These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films)

I think there’s a no-true-Scotsman where each of these boring, normal careers gets recast as something exciting and meaningful. Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.

High-schoolers can volunteer in foreign countries and people will wave it off as PMC strivers padding their resumes. But when a rich kid stumbles into film school he must have collected some valuable experience. It’s a double standard in service of the age-old complaint. Those darn kids just don’t respect their elders.

Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.

Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.

I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.

Sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you, specifically.

I am assuming that maiq, who thinks the people in charge of crappy media got their jobs "without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals," would view such volunteering as a stunt.

if it's significantly less common

Sure. But is it? Do you have any reason to believe that the modal screenwriter used to be more in touch? Because I keep running into examples that look pretty similar to today's.

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George Lucas is capable of making a movie. As in, one. Which he did fifty years ago, and has been coasting on ever since.

He made at least two movies (ANH, ESB). Maybe as many as four (THX-1138, American Grafitti)

He neither directed nor wrote the screenplay for ESB. His only role was a "story by" credit.

It doesn’t have to be specifically weird experiences, but there has to be some kind of life experience outside of LA childhood-> rich people high school -> film school pipeline. And without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals, living in the country, going to parts of third world countries that are not tourist zone, or the like, it’s almost impossible to create those kinds of stories and have authenticity to them. Rural Tennessee is not LA with everyone talking with a southern accent. Military people do not banter like teens at their first job at Starbucks, nor do they disobey orders on a whim.

But that is literally what Lucas did. Screwed around getting into car accidents in high school. Ended up in a fancy college for exactly what he wanted. Made a shitload of money. If at any point he had some enriching experiences in third-world countries, he’s not advertising them.

How many of our greatest writers actually fit your Renaissance man archetype?

I'd say Tolkien, Twain, Orwell, Heinlein, and Hemingway clear the bar. Theodore Roosevelt does too, though he was a man who wrote books more than an author.

I think the prequel trilogy proved that Lucas wasn't the single voice behind the writing for Star Wars: he had to bring in new editors (including his then-wife) to redo the first movie, and then shared writing credits on Empire and Jedi with Lawrence Kasdan. When in charge of everything, the writing quality got noticeably worse, although maybe I'm still too salty about the "Special Editions".

Come to the 4K77 side. We have cookies!

I think there's some truth to this argument, and I've seen people point out examples like how Tolkien was a World War 1 veteran which helped to shape his writing, versus modern TV shows which show military officers in some scifi or medieval setting bantering with each other like they're coworkers at a Starbucks. But I also am left thinking that this just moves the question back a step.

Everyone knows that life experiences can aid in enriching one's fictional writing. Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist. People educated in colleges are often even more aware of these things than the typical layman. Therefore, if I'm a sheltered college graduate wanting to write the next great American novel or the script to some TV show or film I'm pitching, I'm going to try to do as much research as I can to get out of the limitations brought on by my sheltered upbringing and limited experiences. I'm going to dive into research - at a bare minimum do a search on Wikipedia, which it's quite evidence that many of these writers didn't even care to do - to present the characters and settings in as believable and compelling ways as possible, reflecting what someone with true life experiences of those things would have written, even if I myself never had those true life experiences to draw from.

It seems evident to me that very little of that kind of research in order to break out of one's own limitations is occurring in professional TV and film writing. Perhaps in all fiction writing. This speaks to a general lack of passion or pride in the work they're putting out, a lack of desire to actually put together something good. Perhaps it reflects the education that writing is primarily about expressing your true self or whatever, not about serving the audience. Which would also, at least partially, explain why so much criticism is directed at the audience often when these projects fail because the (potential) audience refuses to hand over their money to them for the privilege of viewing them.

Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist.

Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree. Kind of reminds me of the cowpox of doubt: if you've been told that uneducated people get sucked down the rabbit hole of far-right echo chambers, you might think to yourself "phew, good thing I have a degree, that'll never happen to me!" Which might make you even more susceptible to ending up in an echo chamber - perhaps not a far-right one, but an echo chamber of some description.

Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree.

Empirically, I can't disagree. What I find confusing is that, everything you wrote here is also basically common knowledge. Everyone who knows anything about bias knows that the bias of considering oneself above the biases that other people fall for is very common. As such, if you observe other people's biases and think yourself above them, the obvious conclusion would be that you're falling prey to such a bias and should break out of it by challenging yourself with objective research that challenges you.

At least, if you're motivated to write a good work of fiction that can appeal to people outside of your echo chamber. I have to conclude that a high proportion of major fiction writers have no such motivation. The hunger for status within one's echo chamber is often greater than the hunger for money, I suppose.

Tolkien was a World War 1 veteran which helped to shape his writing

Tolkien also was very well-read, both in history and fiction.

You need to know that you’re missing the experience to know you have to look it up on Wikipedia. If you only worked part time as a teenager, you just assume all jobs work like that; if you assume that everyone anti-trans is just a Christian bigot, you don’t have to look up their views, you just write a religious idiot.

I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.

I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.

You're probably correct on this. But it's still confusing to me why. Everyone knows that everyone is missing something due to having limited experiences. Everyone knows that they fall under the category of "everyone" and therefore they must be missing something. It doesn't take much research to find out that life in the modern West, even as a lower class person, is extremely sheltered and protected compared to the norm of humanity. College students have disproportionately high access to research material and disproportionately high experience doing research. If they truly want to write a good novel or film script about a setting or characters they have little personal experiences with, any mid-level intelligent person in that situation should be able to put 2 and 2 together to realize that they need to step out of their bubble and dive into research to learn about lives and circumstances far different from their own.

Which is why I have to conclude that these people don't have motivations to write good fiction.

It can be difficult to properly pierce one's bubble. I was a bookish kid. When I became aware of that I had zero experience of grittier side of life, my first instinct was to explore gritty darker shady parts of life ... in form of reading more books and watching the Wire. Later I have realized I did not obtain a realistic experience.

Genuinely adventurous researcher must act like an old-school journalist, travel to places and meet people he/she would never talk to. You have to be clever enough not be hoodwinked by first charlatan in the way. You must have enough background knowledge to contextualize what you see but not let be too influenced by your background "context" so that you fail to see evidence that contradicts it. Most of the research done and readily available today is .... not that.

And if you were invested in researching and writing a period-accurate historical drama, it is not given that anyone else is interested in historical accuracy.

There are two broad models for film production: the auteur model, where a genius director is granted full control; and the committee model, where a variety of people belonging negotiate for their own interests.

Well, that's a lie. There's a whole spectrum of production models, including genius-director-plus-meddling-executive-directors and committee-headed-by-strong-mayor and collaborators-work-to their strengths. But it's useful to think about every movie as falling (relative to some imaginary baseline) into either camp. Auteur films lie and die on whether their director is actually a genius-- and a genius not just at directing, but at every layer of personnel selection and delegation. That makes them risky, because a director's genius is often relative to the nature of the specific project they're working on. Pretty much every "great" film has been an auteur film, but a disproportionate number of terrible films are auteur films too. In the meantime, committee films pretty invariably fall into a "mediocre but enjoyable" middle zone. When entertainment companies fund a movie, they can afford to take risks on auteurs if the movies being funded are relatively cheap. If 9 of your 10 million dollar movies flop but the last one makes 200 million you're in the black. But blockbusters have to make a return. Netflix Originals can afford to vary in quality, but Marvel movies have to put butts in seats every single time.

Now, all of the above is probably just review-- I'm sure you've heard arguments to that effect before. And it might seem a bit misaimed with your criticism is with writing specifically. Why not just hire a known-genius director, and force them to work with a known-genius writer, and otherwise keep your hands off? The problem is is that the auteur-versus committee problem is fractal. We can say that a genius director should have all the power relative to their production committee, but what about relative to a genius actor, or a genius writer? Compared to novels, scripts are filtered through three extra layers of interpretation: first, the collaborative interpretation between the actor and their director. Then, the interpretation of the camera operator, then the interpetation of the editor. Each layer subtracts some of what the writer's initial intention was, and adds a little of what all the other collaborators are thinking of. That means every layer of production needs to be careful about not spoiling the soup. If they add too much of their own personal flavor, it'll clash with what everyone else is doing. If they add too little, they're create the movie equivalent of that one meme about the horse drawing. So you can't just add a top-tier writer to a project and let them have free reign, because that brings the whole thing out of whack. You can't just lock a bunch of geniuses together in a film studio with an unlimited supply of cocaine, you need genuine collaboration, the entire way up and down the chain. If movies routinely used the exact same crew working together they could be consistently good, but as-is there's no way a production committee can just hope for the best. Thus, executive meddling. Thus, poorly written blockbusters.

We're all griping here, but I suppose we have to remember that Hollywood is a business, and what the people who run the studios want is a successful formula. "X movie made a killing, quick, we must produce our own X movie!" and everyone flogs it to death (see the decline of the MCU) until the next Big Thing comes along, then everyone copies that.

Disney making live-action remakes of the hit animated movies is just more of that, we forget that the hits like "Aladdin" etc. got plenty of straight-to-video sequels (and some pretty good cartoon series). Think of the "Disney on Ice" versions or how they squeezed as much juice as they could out of the original "The Little Mermaid" before the 2023 remake with the race-swapped casting (and if that had been more successful, we'd be up to our knees in sequels, prequels, animated series, etc. etc. etc.)

Making movies is about money, not art, at least on the scale of Hollywood and Disney et al., and they run on P.T. Barnum's adage of "give the people what they want" until the people are sick and tired of it.

The studio system/golden age of Hollywood churned out fast crud, by committee, significantly better than what we have now.

Fast crud, not fast blockbusters. Even committees can take artistic risks when movies are cheap. The 1959 Ben Hur only cost about 150 million dollars in today's money. Back that, that was an absurd amount of money. Today, any given marvel movie will hit that figure.

Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less? We know full well it is possible; Super Mario Bros and Oppenheimer were both made on a budget of $100 million, and both did great at the box office ($1.361 billion and $975.8 million, respectively).

Why are the budgets so out of control? What possessed Disney to invest $250 million on Snow White, or Warner Bros to drop $200 million on Joker 2?

Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less?

They do. But mostly those cheaper movies end up going straight to streaming, because nothing short of a blockbuster puts butts in theater seats.

I can't conceive that any kind of ROI calculation happened with Joker 2. Profit was not the goal. You don't take a small-mid budget film that scored a billion at the box office and go 'for the sequel we'll take a completely different tone and genre and themes! Also to maximize our revenue, also spend 4-5x as much'. No sane person would do this. If it works, do the same thing again but better and follow up on the hit. Don't totally reinvent what you're doing.

But it was the same writers and directors... Only one of three producers was changed.

It really says a lot about our society.

Did it, or did everybody just collectively forget about all of the forgettable trash?

trash

That's what crud means. I'm not talking about the blockbusters. Now, 50s style b movies are different, but the studio system had everyone on top of their game because they were putting movies out so quickly, with teams having control over their specific domain. The end results would often be forgettable but rarely incoherent like today.

Once upon a time, there was this concept of a "tight script". It wasn't so much about the quality of the dialog, so much as making sure every element of the film was telegraphed in advance. Some character is going to have a heart attack at a crucial moment? Show him taking his statins, maybe have his wife nag him about them. There was an understanding that payoffs were more satisfying when they'd been set up. Maybe this is just catering to midwits so they can point at the screen and feel smart that they understood a callback. Maybe, when you are building out a fiction, you need to signpost the elements of the real world that are in play or not so the audience isn't constantly wondering what from the infinite array of all possibilities is on the table here.

I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.

At one point I read some article about the "Asian" method of story telling, which is less about set up and pay off, and more about doing whatever ass pulls are necessary to arrive at the scenes the director wants. The best of these films, if this is at all true, come off as surreal journey's through a director's id. Gozu comes to mind.

I swear we're getting the worst of both worlds. Scripts with zero set up and zero payoff, with none of the coherent vision or creativity of an auteur. A lot can be forgiven if it's done with style. All we get anymore is a 30 producer's coke fueled rantings filtered through a writer's room full of cynical activist who've ruined their lives with their poor choices and worse beliefs, with visual effects produced by some sweatshop.

I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.

Sounds like they took Chekhov’s gun and dialed it up to 11, as it were

I think they dialed it to 6

Watching dinosaurs attack people in thrilling ways is pretty awesome in my book. If the movie doesn't feature that I'd be disappointed. Did you not enjoy it because it was a weak plot? I think some of the previous sequels have beat some of the themes extinct (I never saw the Chris Pratt one). But I expect it to be like another action movie. I intend on seeing it soon.

Well, no, I did not enjoy it. All I could think about while watching the dinosaurs attack was "I don't care what happens to these people". Because the movie didn't make me care.

It is the job of the scriptwriter to create awesome characters that I want to root for, and a believable world with coherent rules that make me believe those characters are truly in danger, because I know that the writer won't just pull a deus ex machina to save them.

The original movie had dinosaurs attacking people and an amazing script. In fact, the former was used somewhat seldomly which (1) made it better and (2) played into what makes the script so good.

Exactly. Watching Dr Grant see a sauropod for the first time is infinitely more impactful than any moment in any of the more recent films despite the much worse CGI in the original precisely because it's actually a superbly made film that understands setup and payoff.

My favorite line was “they do move in herds.” Here was a guy who spent his life claiming to be an expert but the statement revealed his inner uncertainty.

Just chefs kiss.

That and the whole hubris of man theme.

The people making these movies are not trying to impress you, the jaded 115+ IQ critical viewer who will pick apart the plot and complain about the action sequences. They’re much too busy optimizing their films for the international market, where their films will be eagerly lapped up by foreign audiences who’ll be watching them with subtitles. Those audiences are not especially concerned with the snappiness or verisimilitude of the dialogue, because they’re going to miss half of it anyway as they try to shift their eyes between the subtitles and the action taking place above them. (Or, if they’re watching a dubbed version instead, they’re just going to get localized, rewritten dialogue anyway, so the talent of the American scriptwriters is irrelevant.) These audiences want to see a bombastic series of visually-compelling sequences, populated by beautiful American celebrities; if they wanted to watch emotionally-stirring slice-of-life stories, they’d watch media made in their own countries.

Which may have been a good idea 10 or 15 years ago. But now India and China can produce their own special effects pictures. Just making a CGI heavy action or superhero movie no longer automatically guarantees a half billion at the international box office.

China especially has played this perfectly.

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