What do you hate about modern films?

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I agree with all of the above!

This...a billion times over, comic book adaptations along with popular young adult books.

Unfortunatly I dont see this stopping anytime soon. Comic book geeks are a major cash cow.

They're also planning to remake the Spiderman series.

I'm also in agreement with you guys regarding the CGI. I'm also annoyed with the poor adaptations of cartoons and toy franchises from the 1980s. I'm not forgiving those suits for ruining Garfield.

Shaky Cam. Especially in action movies. As far as I'm concerned, shaky came is the cancer that is killing action cinema. The whole "We are doing it to give a documentary feel and to immerse the audience!" is a load of crap. All it does is give me a headache and wonder what the hell is going on. The only time I tolerated shaky came was in the new Rambo movie.

I can go on forever about my disdain for shaky cam, but I'm just going to link to a review of Game which does a better job of explaining how stupid shaky cam is better than I can.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmno ... shaky-cam/

Merchandise. Specifically, merchandise that spoils the movie a month before it hits theaters (comic books and video games that retell the movie's plot! Descriptions on the back of toy packages that outline a character's role in the story...including how he dies!), and merchandise completely against the canon of the film and/or source material.

"And they lived happily ever after"-stories and "perfect superheroes with no flaws".

Only a few moviemakers dare to experiment, i.e. "Eyes wide shut" ended beautifully, they did NOT live happily ever after and the people in "Cloverfield" all died. And heroes like "Iron man" and "Hancock" prove that you do not have to be a stiff-no-fun-moral-guardian-of-the-law to be a superhero.

There's alot of stuff I love about modern films, and alot of stuff I hate.
Because this is the "stuff I hate" thread, i'll list that:

1. How good, intelligent movies are continuously outgrossed at the box office by insipid, moronic movies created and watched by idiots (Kangaroo Jack and Meet the Spartans were massive hits, while films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Big Lebowski die at the box office, mostly due to limited release problems).

2. How independently owned movie theaters are being killed by plastic massive chain-theaters. Tiny theaters that show independent and foreign movies similarly should be dying a slow death, but the people who go to films at those theaters are the people who really love films.

3. How CGI is trying its darnedest to kill traditional 2D animation (be it hand-drawn or computer animated 2-D)

4. How 3D film is making a comeback. It was tacky when it was first popular, it was tacky when it made a resurgence in the 80's and it's tacky now.

5. Parents have now decided that it's perfectly fine to bring their 12 year old and younger children to PG-13 and R movies. I sat an aisle ahead of a group of 10 or 11-year old boys and their parents when I went to see Inglorious Basterds. They wouldn't shut up throughout the film and then they began to cry once it got especially violent, before leaving.

Similarly, when I saw Iron Man 2 yesterday, i once again sat an aisle ahead of a group of 10 or 11 year old boys and their parents, and once again they didn't shut up throughout the film. If I wasn't a very polite person, I would've exploded at them after the movie was over (and also, they left the theater quite speedily after the credits began to roll, while I knew that there was obviously going to be a post-credits sequence and stuck around).

6. Merchandising to an excess. I don't mind merchandising at all for films, however I hate it when the is a need to license the New Big Hit Movie for absolutely everything. Avatar was a prime example. They stamped that bloody film logo on so much garbage that I was surprised that they didn't come out with an Avatar casket.

7. PG now means "it's for kids/families", just like G. This is why Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow flopped. It's target audience (teens and young adults) took one look at the rating and thought it must be for kids.

8. NC-17 is now just as useless as X was. The replacement of X with NC-17 was supposed to be a revitalization of adult-themed non-pornographic films, just like how great movies like Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange received an X before the porn industry got ahold of it. However, NC-17 remains a "kiss of death" to films. No theater chain wants to carry an NC-17 film, and only a few NC-17 movies (A Dirty Shame for instance) will do decent business.

9. Remakes, sequels and adaptations (that aren't of novels) to a point. Sometimes these are great (Star Trek, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) other times they're not. I have no problems with adaptations of novels.

10. The movie industry keeps greenlighting remakes of hallowed, classic movies. Like for instance, the planned Seven Samurai remake. It wouldn't be an adaptation like The Magnificent Seven, it would be an actual remake of one of the finest films ever made. Please, no. I'm currently on the fence about the remake of True Grit because the Coen Brothers have been attached and I trust them.

Last edited by DocStrange on 09 May 2010, 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Romance.

How animation sends the message "For kids". This is why Titan A.E. is an epic fail. Back in the early fifties, Flinstones and Looney Tunes were never intended as "kid's cartoons" and Bambi, was never intended as a kid's movie. But my number one irk has to be how there seems to be a law that any movie that comes out these days must have a romance aspect to it somehow.

This says more about the audience than the producers. About 90% of the population are mindless sheep, and they like their films to fit the right shape. Hence the vanilla flavour and similarity between them. They find intelligent films hard to follow, preferring lots of bangs and flashes and nice easy characters that they can cheer or boo on cue. Comedy is preferably slapstick, and gross-out comedy always does well.

And then there's the producer angle - this stuff works, it's a proven hit, but something intelligent is harder to do and likely to be a commercial disaster. Hence, more pap.



I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking 3D films are pointless. I saw Avatar in 3D and it was visually impressive - for about half an hour. After that I got used to it and didn't even notice any more.



That's nothing. After all the hype and a few recommendations from friends, my partner and I went to see "Paranormal Activity". If you haven't seen it, don't bother - it was rather pointless. At the climax of the film, I almost jumped out of my seat. Not because of the film, but because a score of young teenagers behind me all screamed in shock at the most obvious, predictable and pathetic "scare" I've seen in years.



I know. I'm horrified to learn there's a remake of Nightmare on Elm Street coming out. This was the third horror film I ever saw, back at age 13 (hey, I was always precocious) and I always loved Freddy's wisecracks. I just know this version will be a bog standard serial killer.

part deux-

*they tend towards excessive busy-ness, IOW too much overlapping dialogue for no good purpose other than to befuddle people like myself, in the arch editorial belief that only the hip deserve to comprehend it. if there is to be overlapping dialogue, at least let it be subtitled as much as possible.

*too much jump-cut editing, strobe-like.
*DVDs sans subtitles for the deaf and perceptually-challenged
*too much music in times where natural sounds should predominate
*movie makers who sacrifice their "artistic integrity" to get a family-friendly MPAA rating, in addition to chasing the almighty buck. what bowdlerization Kubrick was forced to inflict upon "eyes wide shut" was ridiculous and made americans seem like just so many puritans in the eyes of the rest of the world. embarrassing. movie classification ratings were supposed to cast aside censorship in the first place.
*24 frames per second is excessively reductive and makes motion blurry and juddery. the industry should have moved on to at least 30 frames per second long ago.
*film emulsion noise. use better stock or switch en masse to ultra hi-def video at 30-60 frames per second or greater - 120 frames per second would be a revelation for the eyes.

There are some great "popular comedy" movies. I found Anchorman, Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder to be continuously entertaining and The Hangover one of the best big budget/big studio comedy films in years. Kevin Smith has made a career making very vulgar but very smart indie comedies, and has more or less made a nice income from them. But mostly, the comedy films that do well are Date Movie and its ilk.



The final NoES film, Wes Craven's New Nightmare was surprisingly good dark comedy about Freddy actually terrorizing Heather Langenkamp (the lead actress from the first film) and her (fictional) family in "real life", with Robert Englund, Wes Craven and the heads of New Line Cinema playing themselves. I'm actually surprised that such a cerebral film was ever greenlighted and would have been a great way to end the franchise. But no, Freddy vs. Jason and this remake.

Ooh, a moan thread. I'm on it. I'm talking mainly about mainstream films.

Mostly it's the speed. They don't let you look at anything for more than a microsecond.
Too much reliance on action.
Generic good looking actors in everything. I used to like characterful looking people.
Warmed over remakes and rip offs of things you've seen a hundred times before.
Bad music that you can't help but notice is trying to manipulate you, instead of artfully lifting you with the film.
Stupid dynamic ranges in the audio; action is at jet engine next to your face level, dialogue is at mouse farting into a silencer inside an anechoic chamber.

or of a mouse peeing on a cotton ball.

Well, a few comments before I start on mine... There are no new stories. Period. That said, I fully agree that there are too many mediocre remakes of films that were already fantastic. They've been remaking The Shop Around the Corner for years and never improved it one iota. Of course, I could make a huge list of reasons why they've failed but Jimmy Stewart is at the top of the list and I'm inclined to leave it at that (I just LOVE Jimmy Stewart).

It was mentioned that the 3-D in Avatar was impressive for about half an hour and then you didn't notice it any more. I would say that this is a really successful use of CGI. What a pointless exercise, what a waste of money, to go to a film made for the sole purpose of having the audience thinking, "Wow, that looks so real," the entire time. No, you should, after first marveling at what man has made, settle in to taking in the story. I mean, we've all been there. We've seen movies that are impressive because of their special effects, and we've seen movies that have a great story and as you discuss the film later, you say, "How about that train sequence? That scared the daylights out of me! It really looked like there was a derailed train heading right for him!" (The Fugitive, by the way... the only part of it I've seen, but so cool)

That said, CGI has a lot of crimes to answer for... I keep seeing anthropomorphic chihuahuas before my eyes as I ponder the question. This leads me to one thing that I (as a parent especially) am sick of... cheap kid movies. Stupid premises, offensive jokes, parents with no bloody brains at all. I don't have a problem with slapstick, far from it. And I show my kids silent movies, Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, and any other older films I like that I can get them to watch. And they love them. My son is especially fond of Danny Kaye and some of those songs his wife wrote for him.

I mention these in connection with CGI for obvious reasons, I think. It seems to me that the really cheap offerings both in theaters and direct to disk kid films (not to mention tv) come straight off a computer. I'd prefer to see a symbiosis, if that's the right word. Take Aardman, for example. "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was done in their usual way but with the use of computers, they were able to track where they were in the stop-motion process and make the shots flow better. No freaky humanized guinea pigs, chihuahuas, etc, no tween secret agents wearing video game suits.

Another thing I hate in modern film is the chick flick. Now, I've recently realized there are all sorts of categories for what would be considered a chick flick, and I do indeed like some of them (see reference to The Shop Around the Corner ). But in studying the different sorts of plots, I found an explanation of a part of the problem, a description that helped me put my finger on what made a movie really awful. Before, the best I could come up with was, "If it stars Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, if there are a lot of females of common age with some sisterhood ritual or shared secret, if there's a scene where they consume some guilty food together and laugh a lot about other people, if they leap into the sack with someone and either tell their friends all about it or don't because their friend wants him too... If there are hardly any men and those who do appear are practically props..."

But this book on plot described sentiment vs sentimentality. On the one hand, you can write your story, create your connections, build the story in the presence of the audience so that those watching know what a certain event means when it happens... That's complete storytelling to me, that's what I am trying to learn. On the other hand, you can fill your story with cliches known by the entire viewing audience and then you have an easy job... it's understood that if a group of women are close at the beginning they will be pulled apart and fight to stay close... that if two friends meet a hot guy someone is going to end up with a broken heart... that if the love object is unattainable, the hero(ine) who does the right thing will find that an almost identical person who is available will turn up during the story wrap-up... that if the two people hate each other at first, they are destined for each other... that if the couple who has not made their declarations get caught out in the rain, there is sure to be a gazebo or other structure nearby and an understanding with be reached between them before the last drop of rain falls (apologies to fans of The Quiet Man... I love that movie and it was used to great effect in it, but there it is. I can think of at least one other film I've seen that used something similar before it).

I love a good romance, see, but what I consider a good romance isn't cliche. Spider-Man 2 for example. Awesome love story! Awesome because the rest was good (and because the CGI sequences were not so bad that they caught your attention like in the first one... they were part of the story. Perfect.). Or Some Kind of Wonderful... there was a touch of cliche but another whole story going on that was woven through the mush.

Oh, I have to throw in a third on the the dynamics problems... Yeah, in the theater you can actually hear it all, but try to watch on disc later and you have to adjust it every few seconds. And I can't take my kids to movies! Toy Story 3 is coming out this year and I don't know whether I dare take my 3-year-old (to an early showing, of course... when the theater will have primarily children and parents) because of what happened when I tried to take her to a free summer movie last year. Thank goodness it was free, too... she freaked out from the start of the first noises and had to be removed from the theater while my older kids sat with my friend and her kids. That was fine, but I can't imagine shelling out the cash to find out she still can't take the volume.

On a derivative topic, just for a moment... your avatar is from my favorite Twilight Zone episode ever. It really opened my eyes to Art Carney's acting ability as well. I mean, when all you ever seem to see of him is clips of the Honeymooners, ugh. I can't abide Jackie Gleason (and I know he was talented too, I just don't like him ).

thanx
i don't believe art and jackie got along too well. i saw a similar dynamic as that between dean martin and jerry lewis- jerry shone so brightly that he drowned-out poor dean, and jackie sucked all the air out of the room, so there was nothing left for poor art. but "night of the meek" was among my favorites, of all the twilight zone episodes.