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Post by Deleted on Mar 26, 2020 21:02:32 GMT
People forget there's a whole world of independent and international cinema out there, if you look beyond Marvel etc. that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of the classics. In many cases they rely on the affordability and logistical freedoms of digital. I revert once again to my man Lav Diaz You own the brush now, you own the gun, unlike before, where it was all owned by the studio. Now it is all yours. It is so free now. I can finish one whole film inside this room . . . We do not depend on film studios and capitalists anymore. This is liberation cinema now . . . Digital is liberation theology. Now we can have our own media. The Internet is so free, the camera is so free. The issue is not anymore that you cannot shoot. You have a South East independent cinema now. We have been deprived for a long time, we have been neglected, we have been dismissed by the Western media. That was because of production logistics. We did not have money, we did not have cameras, all those things. Now, these questions have been answered. We are on equal terms now.That's what I'm saying. Is he just going by the marquee at chain theaters within malls? What about Parasite? Cold War, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Shoplifters, Greener Grass, Mandy, Color out of Space, just same old indistinguishable crap can't tell one from the other? Of course not. One of them (one of my faves of the ones I listed) is a black and white movie from 2018. Color is available so it's clearly an artistic choice. The latter 3 I wouldn't call the movies that stand on the shoulders of giants but they're definitely different looking. Greener Grass is one the most peculiar looking (and just plain peculiar) movies I've seen this year (made last year). It's bizarre and it stars its writer and director so you know she takes it seriously.
Yeah, the world might look crappy out there but even it's not enough to make me forget movies really can be anything by anybody at any time.
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Post by ck100 on Mar 26, 2020 21:06:15 GMT
Brian De Palma on why he didn't direct "Mission: Impossible II" and how he regards the 1990's as one of the best periods of his Hollywood moviemaking career: "Stories, they keep making them longer and longer only for economic reasons. After I made Mission: Impossible, Tom [Cruise] asked me to start working on the next one. I said: 'Are you kidding?' One of these is enough. Why would anybody want to make another one? Of course, the reason they make another one is to make money. I was never a movie director to make money, which is the big problem of Hollywood. That's the corruption of Hollywood." "In my mid-50s doing Carlito's Way and then Mission: Impossible. It doesn't get much better than that. You have all the power and tools at your disposal. When you have the Hollywood system working for you, you can do some remarkable things. But as your movies become less successful, it gets harder to hold on to the power and you have to start making compromises. I don't know if you even realize you're making them... I tend to be very hard-nosed about this. If you have a couple of good decades, that's good, that's great." movieweb.com/mission-impossible-2-why-brain-de-palma-didnt-direct/?fbclid=IwAR3DZCPaafC_Xl2xqa_QIij0UAHMs-LMQxm0pjNgVmabpsYbKYydTZ-1T1o
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Post by Prime etc. on Mar 26, 2020 21:11:07 GMT
He's saying the professional level motion picture in the West has been butchered, watered down, lost its energy and enthusiasm. He's not talking about amateur film. No one could make an OBSESSION now--maybe Nolan, but DePalma was a nobody when he made it, and yet he was given a budget for foreign shooting etc. Hollywood wouldn't do that now.
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Post by Captain Spencer on Mar 26, 2020 21:19:44 GMT
For me, movies got REAL shitty 40 years ago... The 1930-70s is where its at. And not just "the classics" or commercial blockbusters in the US, but movies from all over the world, with no to little popularity as well. Movies became shitty to me in the late 90s because of bad CGI, crappy digital toy cameras, and Hollywood catering to Communist China. I myself also noticed the significant decline in the quality of movies during this era, and for so many reasons. First off, there were too many Titanic wannabes. Then the theaters were flooded with lame romantic comedies. And yes, CGI was taking over big time, thus making movies look like video games. For me, nothing beats good old practical effects. Nowadays we are bombarded by sequels, remakes, reboots, and superheroes. Hollywood just doesn't care about originality anymore.
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Post by theravenking on Mar 26, 2020 22:01:35 GMT
I agree with certain points you've quoted. Brian De Palma painstakingly scouted locations looking for rock, dust and sediment to match up with Mars when making 'Mission To Mars' (2000). Sam Raimi took about 15 years to get 'Spider-Man' (2002) made, waiting for technology to catch up with his artistic vision, and boy does that film look greater today. Wes Craven never got the money to make his film of 'Dr. Strange' and look what they eventually turned out.
Turning films into tv serials means you need "yes" men and that's exactly what the conveyor belt now has. Even people at Marvel Studios admit this. Every product needs to be a cohesive follow-on from the next and that's what they look for. Make superdollars or else.
Compare Steven Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park' adventures to Clive Trevorrow's (who?) messy toilet filler.
Growing up we watched action films from across the decades by Richard Fleischer and Don Seigel, Sam Peckinpah and John Frankenheimer, Walter Hill and John Flynn, James Cameron and John McTiernan, Paul Verhoeven and John Dahl ... who makes muscular art movies like those guys now?
I'm not saying there's nothing good around now, but I do believe Brian De Palma makes some strong points that every film fan would do well to contemplate. Same as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and the others. They learnt form masters that came before them. Who taught Trevorrow? McG?
I find it weird that Marvel keeps hiring these talented indie filmmakers, they start out making interesting smaller films and then on Marvel projects they become interchangeable hacks for hire.
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Post by Fox in the Snow on Mar 26, 2020 22:08:54 GMT
People forget there's a whole world of independent and international cinema out there, if you look beyond Marvel etc. that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of the classics. In many cases they rely on the affordability and logistical freedoms of digital. I revert once again to my man Lav Diaz You own the brush now, you own the gun, unlike before, where it was all owned by the studio. Now it is all yours. It is so free now. I can finish one whole film inside this room . . . We do not depend on film studios and capitalists anymore. This is liberation cinema now . . . Digital is liberation theology. Now we can have our own media. The Internet is so free, the camera is so free. The issue is not anymore that you cannot shoot. You have a South East independent cinema now. We have been deprived for a long time, we have been neglected, we have been dismissed by the Western media. That was because of production logistics. We did not have money, we did not have cameras, all those things. Now, these questions have been answered. We are on equal terms now.There was also a great independent film scene back in Brian De Palma's day which allowed him to make low budget movies.
Yes, people always found a way, but now it's even more accessible and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
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Post by Fox in the Snow on Mar 26, 2020 22:17:06 GMT
People forget there's a whole world of independent and international cinema out there, if you look beyond Marvel etc. that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of the classics. In many cases they rely on the affordability and logistical freedoms of digital. I revert once again to my man Lav Diaz You own the brush now, you own the gun, unlike before, where it was all owned by the studio. Now it is all yours. It is so free now. I can finish one whole film inside this room . . . We do not depend on film studios and capitalists anymore. This is liberation cinema now . . . Digital is liberation theology. Now we can have our own media. The Internet is so free, the camera is so free. The issue is not anymore that you cannot shoot. You have a South East independent cinema now. We have been deprived for a long time, we have been neglected, we have been dismissed by the Western media. That was because of production logistics. We did not have money, we did not have cameras, all those things. Now, these questions have been answered. We are on equal terms now.That's what I'm saying. Is he just going by the marquee at chain theaters within malls? What about Parasite? Cold War, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Shoplifters, Greener Grass, Mandy, Color out of Space, just same old indistinguishable crap can't tell one from the other?
Exactly, all great films, though I've not seen Color Out of Space or Greener Grass yet.
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Post by Prime etc. on Mar 26, 2020 22:52:24 GMT
Digital allows creative freedom to anybody, but it also allows corporate bureaucrats to have far more control over the final image than ever before. 30 years ago a room full of suits could not dictate every corner of every frame of a film--now they can. They can be on location watching the whole thing without leaving their office.
But the big loss is the destruction of genre film. Horror, thriller, action, mystery. Compared to 50 years ago, it has become far less interesting.
Color Out of Space may be a stand alone genre film, but its also a remake. 50 years ago at this time Colossus the Forbin Project came out. And that was a Universal film.
Poor Forbin is stuck in Genoa City now.
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Post by johnspartan on Mar 27, 2020 14:15:13 GMT
Cinematography really got bad. Yeah, all the best movies I've seen were shot on film and all the worst movies I've seen were shot on digital. This is no coincidence.
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Post by Prime etc. on Mar 27, 2020 14:25:52 GMT
Yeah, all the best movies I've seen were shot on film and all the worst movies I've seen were shot on digital. This is no coincidence. That wasn't the point--digital can be made to look like film. The dark lighting is a choice. Other factors besides camera technology contribute to why films are bad.
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Post by petrolino on Mar 27, 2020 18:53:11 GMT
I agree with certain points you've quoted. Brian De Palma painstakingly scouted locations looking for rock, dust and sediment to match up with Mars when making 'Mission To Mars' (2000). Sam Raimi took about 15 years to get 'Spider-Man' (2002) made, waiting for technology to catch up with his artistic vision, and boy does that film look greater today. Wes Craven never got the money to make his film of 'Dr. Strange' and look what they eventually turned out.
Turning films into tv serials means you need "yes" men and that's exactly what the conveyor belt now has. Even people at Marvel Studios admit this. Every product needs to be a cohesive follow-on from the next and that's what they look for. Make superdollars or else.
Compare Steven Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park' adventures to Clive Trevorrow's (who?) messy toilet filler.
Growing up we watched action films from across the decades by Richard Fleischer and Don Seigel, Sam Peckinpah and John Frankenheimer, Walter Hill and John Flynn, James Cameron and John McTiernan, Paul Verhoeven and John Dahl ... who makes muscular art movies like those guys now?
I'm not saying there's nothing good around now, but I do believe Brian De Palma makes some strong points that every film fan would do well to contemplate. Same as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and the others. They learnt form masters that came before them. Who taught Trevorrow? McG?
I find it weird that Marvel keeps hiring these talented indie filmmakers, they start out making interesting smaller films and then on Marvel projects they become interchangeable hacks for hire.
It's probably a different kind of pressure faced by directors going mainstream nowadays. The powerful advertising lobbies, legions of corporate executives and rabid shareholders are now regularly looking to break into the billions - no longer just the megamillions - and they have a multitude of merchandise deals to uphold while batting a family-friendly audience back and forth with the Pixar network.
Brian De Palma's generation was called "the first film school generation". They had a fertile training ground - there was the rise of the independents (led by maverick filmmaker Roger Corman) and the freedom offered by drive-ins, veteran studio system directors becoming teachers and lecturers at the institutions of education they attended, huge gaps appearing in the market as audiences moved away from the MGM "million stars" ethos and embraced unpredictable starlets and white t-shirt rebels with pompadours. Clearly, the time was right to forge ahead with something new, and they did exactly that, during revolutionary times.
De Palma is an audio-visual stylist of wide arcs and audacious camera movements, inventive hand-held / steadicam shots and elaborate tracking shots. Some influential directors that came before him, like Sidney Lumet for example, had demonstrated that you could reap benefits in the quest for technical audacity if you were prepared to do things the hard way (it's no coincidence that both Lumet and De Palma would go on to work with legendary location-based movie producer Marty Bregman). For example, rehearsing entire casts like theatre troupes (which is why Lumet liked theatre actors), or devising the kind of complicated blocking you might expect to see in a Paul Brown NFL scheme (which is why Lumet liked theatre actors). De Palma's best set-pieces are miniature masterpieces in themselves, created through hard work, talent, skill, daring and ingenuity.
Nowadays, it seems so much of cinema is filled in afterwards. As a result, this current cycle has reared a new breed specialising in blue screen, green screen and the hot body athletic, directors who request of their actors that they groom excessively and dehydrate for days to create Vince McMahon-style steroid frames. It's said actors today are more into body-enhancing drugs than mind-altering substances, conscious they are always on somebody's private camera, understandably disgusted by tobacco smoke. Equality demands more Hollywood actors bare their well-toned bottoms, while actresses often negotiate multi-million dollar, no-nudity, modesty clauses within contracts, instead offering up exclusive lingerie deals, restricted camera angles, digitally-enhanced side-boob, and, in some cases, carefully planned nipple slips (though the nipple might be digitalised as well as exclusive). Imagine De Palma trying to work around that? It's another reason Paul Verhoeven returned home to Netherlands.
Then there's the use of big screen fireworks rather than camera crew innovation, which to be fair, is nothing new. Set off explosions and then shoot, place the spectacle before the audience, distract them with shiny objects. Steven Spielberg, of the Hitchcock school, mined plenty of suspense before the arrival of a deadly dinosaur in 'Jurassic Park' (1993). Clive Trevorrow simply invited a ton of them to walk on screen and generated $1.6 billion in box office revenue.
I still turn out for indie directors, but some of them were active in the 1980's or 1990's, be it Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater or Noah Baumbach. I was largely put off by the Sundance Film Festival's embrace of indie mumblecore in the 2000's, which became more about exploring peoples' inner-feelings and less about reinventing genre cinema (as De Palma's generation had done before them).
Still, I do see talent emerge. Be it Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle or Sean Donohue, the talent's undoubtedly there. So I'm not fussed, nor am I worried - I just vote with my wallet. That's why I stopped watching the assembly-line comic book pictures, because they stopped working for me (as a horror fan, I find later sequels trotted out in slasher series usually aren't as effective as the earlier ones). But I'm glad a lot of people still enjoy them, and I speak with Marvel fans who believe the films coming out now are the best yet, so it's just not my thing.
When De Palma's generation step aside, which I believe they're in the process of doing right now, we'll see what these hotshots are really made of.
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Post by johnspartan on Mar 27, 2020 20:10:42 GMT
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