Tarantino suggests modern era tied for worst ever

[ed2962]

Rather than just complaining all these directors who have a problem with the industry today should do what Marvel did. A bunch of them should get together and start their own studio. Then make whatever movie they want to make and if it’s a hit then make more and so on and so on.

If Marvel can start a studio while on the verge of bankruptcy then four or five big name directors should be able to. Who knows. It might even work.

Tarantino did have his own production company, A Band Apart, for a long time. But a major hurtle is not just getting a movie made, but getting it distributed.

[ed2962]

I think it's more about weaker films than the good stuff. He seems to believe that bad stuff can diminish a reputation, which may be why he's big on the idea that he'll quit Hollywood after ten films.

I like the guy, but I think he's just run out of ideas. He's remade all the movies from the 70's that he likes. Other people are already hip to Asian cinema and redoing those. So there's nothing left for him. I actually wouldn't mind seeing him direct scripts by other people but he doesn't seem to be interested in that.

[HollowSage]

Tarantino did have his own production company, A Band Apart, for a long time. But a major hurtle is not just getting a movie made, but getting it distributed.

Marvel had the same hurdle. I’m sure a group of big name directors can find distribution if they really tried. Of course first they need a movie that people actually want to go see. That’s what they are really upset about. More people would rather go see a superhero movie than whatever movie they want to make.

[HollowSage]

Well, the audience can only respond to what gets made and distributed. It's been a decades long criticism that at best the major studios won't take chances on certain material "But will it sell in Peoria?" At worst, not greenlighting movies based on their own biases, "black people don't like science fiction"..."People don't want to see women action roles"..."Put a dog in that scene because people like little dogs"...

I said Hollywood makes movies they think people want to see. I didn’t say they were always right. In fact they are often wrong and that’s why they have to look at what works and what doesn’t.

If a movie exec thinks something is a good idea but audiences reject it then it’s killed and they try something else. Audiences have the final vote with their wallets. If audiences decided in large numbers that they wanted art house movies then studios would push out art house movies until people were sick of them.

[Agent Z]

Nothing is original. Everything is piggy-backing off something else.

Glad you understand this much.

Little fish feast on big fish. Just how we drank milk from our mothers-breasts to know the true meaning behind the obsession with the "roundness". If anything is original then it is something drawn from our world and even that is compromised. Take "Rick and Morty" content. Most of it is taken from it not already appeared in "Scud: The Disposable Assassin", "Cherry", "Earthworm Jim", and various Channel 101 skits. There is an entire episode that flat-out parodies "Los Cosa Nostroid". RAM clearly notes that it is referencing something else.

All films if not most are generically lesser-children-books made for somebody who wants to watch martial-arts, suggestive sexual intercourse, and explosions meant to set off various responses.
Like how we all have this problem called "Baby Speak" until we get into the job market and or realize that our peers slowly grow into to the habit of seeing each other as walking appendix.
Same where all videogames are literally Tic-Tac-Toe ( nobody can disprove this ), other wise your playing a game of Pacinko.

What the hell are you rambling about?

........is living the dream he had from his childhood or whatever. Like a normal person who had a skill and got good at it. So what if he took Cleopatra Jones, updated her to the current setting of where she would be still looking so fine , and the kind of life she would get away living with or people she deals with. So what if he made a movie featuring what clearly is a live BDSM set, that had questionable images and videos. I mean you could see parody after parody. Your going to argue the "Wicked Lady" should have never been remade and or how nobody should have adopted the character for usage in other scenario's. Guy lived and now let others live.

So what the hell do you and he have with other directors doing the same? Tarantino can write his own fanfic about how his self insert could beat Bruce Lee but other Hollywood directors are hacks for making superhero movies that people like?

[Agent Z]

All this being said, the one thing I will push back against (that some in this thread are suggesting) is that movies are now "woke" compared to the past.

That is patently untrue given how much the MPAA has completely clamped down on sexual content in movies. Movies from yesteryears had a lot more "objectionable content" compared to today (anyone that's watched movies from the 1970s to around 1993 knows what I'm talking about).

The big studios on their own part try as much as possible to get a PG-13 rating for their big movies just to reach the largest audiences. And even when R-rated movies are released, we rarely get any sexual content in them.

A lot of people complain about movies being preachy today because we have LGBTIQ representation in a few superheroes and animated movies. This representation itself is so sanitized that you wouldn't even know they were in the movies (without prior comic books knowledge, no one would know Ayo and Aneka were gay in Black Panther 2). This moral panic is irritating because these people are bringing another form of "satanic panic" and want to erase the existence of LGBTIQ people which is absurd considering a growing number of people in the US are identifying as LGBTIQ.

If anything, standards for objectionable content have reduced. 1963's Promises! Promises! was banned in several cities because of a scene where Jayne Mansfield is in the bath covered in bubbles and Alfred Hitchcock had to beg for a toilet to be shown in Psycho. Meanwhile, Deepwater, a movie released in 2022, has a scene in which Ana de Armas gives a blowjob and then picks pubic hair out of her teeth.

[Bunch of Coconuts]

Can someone translate about half of what I just read?

[Username taken]

If anything, standards for objectionable content have reduced. 1963's Promises! Promises! was banned in several cities because of a scene where Jayne Mansfield is in the bath covered in bubbles and Alfred Hitchcock had to beg for a toilet to be shown in Psycho. Meanwhile, Deepwater, a movie released in 2022, has a scene in which Ana de Armas gives a blowjob and then picks pubic hair out of her teeth.

Deep Water went to streaming. It wasn’t released in theaters.

Streaming is a different beast. You can get away with a lot on streaming compared to theatre released pictures. Deep Water is exactly the kind of movie that would have been released in theatres back in the day but now it goes straight to streaming. Same with stuff like Voyeurs, the erotic genre alone was kind of thriving thing in the day but now it’s on Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the others.

Streaming content on average is far more explicit than what you will see in theaters. That’s why you see certain kinds of content on streaming and not in theaters. That being said, stuff like Wild Orchid or Angel Heart were more explicit than Deep Water (so much so that the sex scene in Wild Orchid was suspected to be real). Cruising had explicit gay content in it and that was in 1980. That’s not to say we don’t get explicit stuff in theater released movies anymore, its just not as ubiquitous as it used to be.

My point though was from the 1970s into the 1990s there was a ton of stuff in movies that we barely see anymore. A PG rated movie in the 1980s like Splash or Dragon Slayer had female nudity (some fairly explicit). You can’t see that anymore (Disney initially censored the nudity in Splash). Heck, even remakes of older properties like Total Recall and Robocop were watered down into PG-13. The MPAA has come down very, VERY hard on sexual content in movies while becoming more lax on violent content (that’s why gnarly stuff like Dr Strange 2 can get a PG-13 rating).

[HollowSage]

Can someone translate about half of what I just read?

Basically don’t type while high. At least that was my interpretation.

[ed2962]

I said Hollywood makes movies they think people want to see. I didn’t say they were always right. In fact they are often wrong and that’s why they have to look at what works and what doesn’t.

If a movie exec thinks something is a good idea but audiences reject it then it’s killed and they try something else. Audiences have the final vote with their wallets. If audiences decided in large numbers that they wanted art house movies then studios would push out art house movies until people were sick of them.

Sure, but even at Marvel, it's no secret that the Black Panther and Black Widow movies were vetoed for years by Ike Pearlman and these weren't art house movies. Ike just thought they couldn't sell despite the fact that the general public were asking for them. It wasn't until Ike got moved to another position that we got BP and Captain Marvel and then BW. These movies were hits. Ike didn't want to make them because he didn't want to make them. Now think about how many other movies don't get greenlit because a studio head thinks, "Oh, this isn't interesting to me, therefore no one else is interested in it." The "let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes" attitude ended long ago.

[Mister Mets]

There are some wrinkles here that complicate the discussion. I'll note I like many recent films, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I can understand that this is an unusual time in the movie industry.

Tarantino has old-fashioned tastes. He doesn't like digital projectors, because he thinks if it's not on actual film it's TV. So we've got to keep in mind that he has eccentric and uncompromising views.
https://nofilmschool.com/2014/05/que...n-death-cinema

He also thought Taxi Driver was compromised with the decision to cast Harvey Keitel as a pimp, rather than a black man.

But there are some big changes in blockbusters. Superhero films dominate right now, but there's also a focus on shared universes that is new. The ongoing narratives in film series are also more complex, thanks to the ease with which a filmgoer can see an earlier adventure to find out what happened to James Bond or the Navi. That goes against the idea of films as standalone projects.

There is also the argument that too many major films are morally simpler in order to appeal to international audiences, and sell toys. Detractors will point to a lack of steaminess, as well as cultural specificity.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainmen...ird-about-sex/

There is something weird in the response to movies. In the early 90s, it seemed there were movies that quickly were accepted into the pantheon like Goodfellas, Unforgiven, Silence of the Lambs, Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. There's some stuff now that has powerful reputations, but not as much. This could be that fans are more niche-ified than they used to be.

Finally, there is the sense that Directors Voice doesn't matter much in movies. I loved Spider-Man No Way Home, and Avengers: Endgame, but would either film be radically different if the directors had swapped? One factor is that in major blockbusters, so many people contribute to the final work. For example, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever gets a lot of credits for costume design and set design, while second unit directors are primarily responsible for many of the action scenes.

[Kirby101]

Don't disagree with what you are saying Mets, but

gets a lot of credits for costume design and set design, while second unit directors are primarily responsible for many of the action scenes.

says hello to Ben Hur.

[Grapeweasel]

*quickly Googles 'Deep Water'......*

[godisawesome]

As far now, I definitely side with Tarantino a good bit. It's harder to defend Hollywood as it is right now, it really is. Our best blockbusters are relatively weak films. It's tough. Of course there's still some great films. But they're lower and lower budgeted and fewer see them. It feels like streaming shows have overtaken cinema in terms of boldness and quality. It's a tough time.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think this is a strictly nostalgia-goggles filter mixed with the fact that we need to acknowledge that the morphing of entertainment into a digital era is much like the birth of television or original premium TV - they've progressed the audience and the industry to a whole new world, and changed the standards yet again. There's a lot of shitty blockbusters from the Golden Age of Hollywood, New Hollywood, and every other epoch - and to be honest, standalone films that try to be edgy or bold shouldn't be seen as endangered by the lack of movie screens, but rather simply being unveiled as "niche" more than anything.

But I also just generally despise the idea of the "art film," "important films," or the idea that modern blockbusters are of lesser quality because they sometimes play it "safe" - because usually, "art film" just means it's a movie that a viewer wants to convince themselves is more important or meaningful than it is, "important film" just means that person is going to act patronizing and myopic to try and convince others the film is more meaningful than it is, and "safe" just as often applies to the "Award Bait" films that clog up critical darling lists every year, then disappear into obscurity, and that's when it doesn't mean that it's simply a disagreement over what audience should be catered to (because critics are JUST as susceptible to pandering.)

TIME is the only thing that can actually determine an art's quality - and often has very little to do with contemporary trends or professional critic tastes. If decades later, your film still matters, it's important. If decades later, only people with boring tastes in films talk about your film, it doesn't - even if it was "avant garde" or "daring" back when it was released.

"Originality," "Boldness," is overrated - not because they don't matter but because ultimately they can still be just as "safe" as crowd-pleasing faire or market trends.

Anytime I hear someone bemoan the sameness of the MCU, I'm reminded of the sameness of most Award Bait films, and I know they just want to have their tastes and priorities catered to instead of other people's.

[Mister Mets]

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think this is a strictly nostalgia-goggles filter mixed with the fact that we need to acknowledge that the morphing of entertainment into a digital era is much like the birth of television or original premium TV - they've progressed the audience and the industry to a whole new world, and changed the standards yet again. There's a lot of shitty blockbusters from the Golden Age of Hollywood, New Hollywood, and every other epoch - and to be honest, standalone films that try to be edgy or bold shouldn't be seen as endangered by the lack of movie screens, but rather simply being unveiled as "niche" more than anything.

But I also just generally despise the idea of the "art film," "important films," or the idea that modern blockbusters are of lesser quality because they sometimes play it "safe" - because usually, "art film" just means it's a movie that a viewer wants to convince themselves is more important or meaningful than it is, "important film" just means that person is going to act patronizing and myopic to try and convince others the film is more meaningful than it is, and "safe" just as often applies to the "Award Bait" films that clog up critical darling lists every year, then disappear into obscurity, and that's when it doesn't mean that it's simply a disagreement over what audience should be catered to (because critics are JUST as susceptible to pandering.)

TIME is the only thing that can actually determine an art's quality - and often has very little to do with contemporary trends or professional critic tastes. If decades later, your film still matters, it's important. If decades later, only people with boring tastes in films talk about your film, it doesn't - even if it was "avant garde" or "daring" back when it was released.

"Originality," "Boldness," is overrated - not because they don't matter but because ultimately they can still be just as "safe" as crowd-pleasing faire or market trends.

Anytime I hear someone bemoan the sameness of the MCU, I'm reminded of the sameness of most Award Bait films, and I know they just want to have their tastes and priorities catered to instead of other people's.

Tarantino's not really a big fan of award bait films. In a list of movies he likes, about 8 out of 45 would be Awardsbait (Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, Dunkirk, The Social Network, Apocalypse Now, The Great Escape, Sorcerer, There Will Be Blood, Taxi Driver) although most are not the conventional kind.

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/qu...r-hansen-1974/