movies

[33anda3rd]

I honestly think you're fooling yourself if you think studios weren't always adamant about making money.

Oh, I totally know that. Just, the studios then had faith in audiences to be drawn to quality work. The lion's share of the effort put into a film was put into quality. Now, it's put into marketing and spectacle. They would put their money behind Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Last Picture Show, etc. Movies like that...actually, movies like those are not made any more, but the closest we have to movies like that, they're being made outside the studio system, who will wait for Sundance buzz or other signs of marketability before they buy the film. Instead of supporting ideas and people they support market research and buzz.

If Taxi Driver had never been made, and Schoeder was shopping the script now, he'd never sell it to a studio. They'd avoid him like the plague. If Cimino wanted to make Deer Hunter now, it would never happen. Too long. No easy-to-support main characters. Main character is too unlikeable. How do we open this film? What will it gross on its first weekend? On the other hand: here are three three-hour films about trolls and wizards with CGI and stuff. They'll rush to invest nine figures.

I guess I did mis-remember the boobs scene in Titanic, which is IMO as much a function of Titanic being unremarkable as it is me being incapable of remembering. I wasn't a teen, and had seen plenty of boobs by then. (What's her name, Pheobe Cates, in Fast Times was my Winslet-in-Titanic boobs moment.) The boobs scene was a different thing, and was still about boobs. Kudos to Cameron for not having a meaningless sex scene, though.

[obucard]

Also, the imdb thing is kind of a straw man argument.

Totally.

IMDb voters are hardly any reasonable standard to discuss film unless it's very specifically related to how popular a movie is with average schmucks.

Today's epic films are made for average schmucks. They exist to make money.

First thing that came to mind (NSFW Language):

[33anda3rd]

This is like crapping on a guy for hitting 25 HRs and an .800 OPS because he's not Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

I'd comp it more to crapping on a manager for giving a guy 600 PA when he has a 217/265/302 slash line. The guy didn't justify those PA, the same as Jackson and Cameron don't justify their epic run times.

[Jocephus]

one thing about movies, you can't quantify them, so booyah, ernest goes to camp could have won an oscar. deal with it.

[JL21]

I honestly think you're fooling yourself if you think studios weren't always adamant about making money.

Oh, I totally know that. Just, the studios then had faith in audiences to be drawn to quality work. The lion's share of the effort put into a film was put into quality. Now, it's put into marketing and spectacle. They would put their money behind Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Last Picture Show, etc. Movies like that...actually, movies like those are not made any more, but the closest we have to movies like that, they're being made outside the studio system, who will wait for Sundance buzz or other signs of marketability before they buy the film. Instead of supporting ideas and people they support market research and buzz.

If Taxi Driver had never been made, and Schoeder was shopping the script now, he'd never sell it to a studio. They'd avoid him like the plague. If Cimino wanted to make Deer Hunter now, it would never happen. Too long. No easy-to-support main characters. Main character is too unlikeable. How do we open this film? What will it gross on its first weekend? On the other hand: here are three three-hour films about trolls and wizards with CGI and stuff. They'll rush to invest nine figures.

That was one very special era in American film history. Note that everything you just mentioned (with the exception of Lawrence of Arabia) was from the 70s, when Hollywood had no choice but to try something new because audiences had grown tired of their spectacles of the day. People were sick of John Wayne movies or war movies or musicals come the late 60s and the studios realized they needed new blood. Even then, it took a tidal wave of success from some extremely talented filmmakers before the studios would trust those guys.

I'd love for that to come back, and frankly I think the age we live in has opened us up to a world of possibilities. Between VOD, streaming, places like the Alamo Drafthouse and the indie studios, and just plain ol' Youtube, talented young filmmakers have more freedom now than they've ever had to find an audience. None of those outlets were on the table in, say, 1950, or even 1975.

That said, I don't think it's as dire as you're making it these days, either. I won't argue the lack of originality, but I do think some of the spectacle films have raised their game. Good filmmakers like Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, and Edgar Wright (to name a few) are getting their shot at wider releases, they're influencing the system. Some of the dopey comic book movies that everyone likes to bash have been rich in subtext- they aren't Superman (1979) or even Burton's Batman. Basically, I think it's bad but I don't think it's some awful wasteland. And I think there's a lot to find to enjoy in a lot of movies, big budget or otherwise. It's about finding what films do right instead of harping on what they do wrong.

[33anda3rd]

Yeah, we're in great shape with VOD and everything. It's awesome that Jarmusch can get the dough to make what he wants to make and put it out there. I'd hope that we're already in a place where spectacle has grown tiring to the public and we can see more thoughtful studio films. It's a chicken/egg thing. Studios are afraid to get behind thoughtful movies because they don't think audiences will support them. Audiences flock to thoughtless comic book fare, telling the studios with their buying power "give us more." Hollywood celebrates these big box-office successes with Oscars and back-patting themselves for doing a great job.

[slide_into_first]

I can't remember if there was boobage but Therese and Isabelle was a good movie for high school boys.

[ghostrunner]

The LoTR films are classics. Really spectacular successes in latter-day epic filmmaking.

Yes. But. You must be into epic filmmaking to fully appreciate those films, and latter-day epic filmmaking is throw-away entertainment: self-indulgent, more invested in the FX room than the set, cribbed from cartoonish/fantasy source material that's geared more toward teens than adults, and produced not as a work of art but as a piece of entertainment that generates billions in revenue. LOTR is one in a sea of too-long fantasies. No one talks about Titanic now (and TItanic was pretty unanimously the Most Best Ever when it came out, an Epic Movie that swept the Oscars) and that's been less than 20 years. In 50 years no one will be talking about LOTR the way we talk now about The Godfather, which is genuinely amazing epic moviemaking that's on a level Peter Jackson can't sniff. Lawrence of Arabia. Dr. Zhivago. If I was going to list off Great Epic Movies probably the closest I'd get to the 2000s is Kurosawa's "Ran" or perhaps "Last of the Mohicans."

I think they're flawed but this is all wrong IMO. Did you end up watching any more than the first hour? Weird place to stop too, as the first movie is probably the best in terms of story. Anyway can't answer in full right now, but LOTR is Star Wars for some people.

OK - back to this - I will say a lot of this could apply to the Hobbit movies, and I was almost certain that must have been what you meant, but that's a hard mistake to make. Jackson was on and off the Hobbit many times and I'd guess he mostly did them for the money and because nobody else was available. There's way too much CGI, dumb plot contrivances, an unneeded love story, bloat, etc...

Lord of the Rings on the other hand - I was pretty pumped about them when they came out, so I know a good bit about them. Jackson was a driving force behind getting those made and it's pretty well known to have been a labor of love for him. He worked on getting it going back as far as 95 or so. The Hobbiton set had flowers planted on it a full year before they filmed anything there. The costume and props team spent about the same amount of time preparing in advance of filming. There's CG, but there's also a lot of full scale set construction and forced perspective, and other old school camera tricks. Having said that, CG can accomplish in many cases the same things as a real set in many ways so if it's effective that's not really a knock on it.

I'll leave alone the cribbing from fantasy/teen sources, except to say these are pretty dense books loved by adults for decades. While we're on the source material, about 90-95% of what's in the movies comes directly from the books. To the extent there's bloat it's attributable to that, or perhaps Jackson's unwillingness to cut more. But he set out to film the books, so it's there to take or leave. I think it's fully intended to be a piece of art as well as entertainment. Accessible, mainstream art for sure, but sincerely intentioned, at least as much as something like Jaws, ET or Star Wars.

Titanic is still talked about by plenty of people. It's not one of my favorites, but it's at least the same category as Ben Hur. Not the greatest story and even some bad acting, but groundbreaking and memorable set pieces.

[ghostrunner]

Take the TSPDT full list of 1000 and sort by run time. Look at everything running three hours or longer. How many of those films can you honestly say LOTR or Titanic is in a class with? If you sort the list by ranking, you don't find a lot of movies over 135 minutes toward the top, except several Coppolas, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick, Ozu, names like that. Master filmmakers who can fill 2.5 or more hours of your time without wasting a bit of it. Jackson and Cameron fill your time and produce some nice spectacle but they waste a lot of film and money and time on stuff that's just meaningless spectacle.

I don't even know what to do with this. Why are we arbitrarily sorting by run times? As a yardstick for epicness or something? I don't care if something is supposedly an epic or not. Just because you run over 2.5 hours doesn't mean you get judged a different way. It's not a list of epic films, it's a list of films.

[The Third Man]

If Taxi Driver had never been made, and Schoeder was shopping the script now, he'd never sell it to a studio. They'd avoid him like the plague.