For me it's mostly the characters and the narratives that feel "less real" than they used to. Something about seeing the same actor, in the same role and doing the same things, but 30 years older doesn't really sell the realism. Similarly, a new actor in an old role doesn't really either. We've lost a lot of novelty, real life is much more spontaneous whereas movies are increasingly contrived.
I have the opposite reaction in many cases. When we switched to 4k Blu-ray, I found it difficult to get immersed in many movies because they mostly looked like I was watching the shooting of a movie. Everything looked like a newsroom. Increases in fidelity don't make things more real, they uncover bad acting. My preference was to watch 720p24 movies on a plasma TV (or theatres back in those days)--I wasn't looking for a VR-like experience, rather a visual book reading. Another really weird one was The Hobbit at 48fps.
Expectations change, now 1080p24 seems better--but I suspect this has a lot to do with compression. Even with 4k a typical level of compression on streaming platforms takes away the texture and feeling of a scene.
I love the thread about Barry Lyndon. I’ve seen it for the first time recently and it is clear there is no talent, or rather no money, to create something so earnest and opinionated. The problem isn’t film, isn’t digital, isn’t the ironic dialogue of modern blockbuster, isn’t lack of art sense, it’s all of the above. It is clear that film, and any other creation today, is soulless, aims at the common denominator, there is no strong opinion, no auteurship. You see that in blockbuster film, blockbuster game design, blockbuster art even. In software.
Call me old and grumpy but there is a real sense that this data- and money-driven approach is the lowest, most sterile point for artistry and creativity. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is the antithesis of the relentless pursuit of revenue and efficiency. You do not have art when you need not to offend anyone but sell the most units. When art is just another product out of the industrial line.
> isn’t lack of art sense, it’s all of the above. It is clear that film, and any other creation today, is soulless, aims at the common denominator [...]
That's a problem with what you seek, rather than what is created.
There are lots of films and other creations being made that are the exact opposite of soulless, and does not aim for the common denominator.
Yes the big blockbuster movies are typically predicable sequels with limited inspiration. But that's what the audience wants. If Barry Lyndon premiered this year it wouldn't be a blockbuster hit, I am sure.
So you need to put in some effort, and not just go on the highway and complain it's not an exciting drive.
It’s facile and frankly uninteresting to put the blame on the critic, in this case my comment. I don’t watch blockbuster movies, I enjoy the indie scene in music and video games. I know there is always a niche of earnest art if one looks deep enough, but that shouldn’t stop us from having a conversation about what is going on with our culture and where we are going.
In fact this ‘meh it is what it is, just ignore it’ is another manifestation of this culturally-low point we find ourselves in, unwilling to imagine a better world, to even try to push against the status quo.
We have gone through these phases multiple times in history, and periods of ‘renaissance’ owe everything to those unreasonable people that claimed “this is terrible, I shall do better!” rather than just shrugging it out.
You make a fair point about cultural conversation being important. I think that conversation is happening, but the focal point shifts from one generation of creatives to the next. It's an important part of cultural dialogue, not just reaching the same targets as previous works, but finding new targets, new mediums and methods of expression.
We saw the shift toward a more fractured landscape happen in music long before movies. If you grew up hearing the Beatles on mainstream radio, listening today might feel like a cultural low point. And that feeling isn't baseless. But treating the Top 40 as the whole of music ends up missing the new developments happening outside that narrow slice.
We're seeing similar shifts in film. The Blair Witch Project and Once Upon a Time in Mexico heralded the age of accessible digital filmmaking, leading to an indie boom that's still rippling out. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once showed that ambitious, effects-heavy filmmaking is no longer tethered to the traditional studio system. Those are the high profile bellwethers -- indie bands that sneak in a radio hit -- but I think they reflect the wider landscape of passionate creatives better than, say, the new Jurassic World.
So yes, blockbusters aren't what they used to be. But judging the health of the entire medium by looking at those is like judging transportation by looking at horse-drawn carriages after the arrival of cars. It focuses on what's leaving instead of what's emerging.
> It’s facile and frankly uninteresting to put the blame on the critic, in this case my comment.
Well in that case your critique failed at the gates.
If your problem is that other people don't like the things you think they should like, or that movie theaters shouldn't show "soulless" movies, then say that then.
> In fact this ‘meh it is what it is, just ignore it’ is another manifestation of this culturally-low point we find ourselves in
That's the exact opposite of what I was saying. There's good stuff out there being made. Seek it, support it.
I think you might be looking at the film through rose tinted glasses without the broader context. Kubrick's films had been nominated for 9 Academy Awards and won 1 (he was personally nominated 3 times) by the time Barry Lyndon started filming. (He had also directed a certain Spartacus.)
Warner Brothers were keen to bankroll whatever he wanted to do, even tolerating moving the country of production due to the Troubles.
He was given some artistic freedom due to previous commercial success - ie. a "data- and money-driven approach". He also really wanted to be making a Napoleon biopic, but financing was pulled when a similar film failed at the box office, so he didn't get it all his own way.
Barry Lyndon was only a modest commercial succes. So much so that Warner Brothers hooked him up with a much safer bet for them for their next venture. He was given unfinished manuscript of The Shining, from the wildy popular best seller King for his next project, which was also simpler to produce ie. "relentless pursuit of revenue".
TLDR Making films is expensive and needs to be a commercial activity, but every now and then there's a fortunate crossover of quality and funding. This still happens but you need to look out for it.
If one is shooting film, then they have to make visual choices during the shoot. Shooting with high range digital cameras and grading it later allows for delaying the decision.
The problem (IMO) is that more stakeholders then get involved in deciding what the look of the film should be. Good looking films make bold visual choices, and bold decisions rarely come from a committee.
I remember the 1960s Star Trek and Doctor Who had bad special effects, but had the story and acting that made up for it. The story made it real; now we have special effects with AI and supercomputers, but how good is the story? Writers and actors make the difference.
Yeah it's less about Chris Pratt's ability to inhabit and exude a character, as much as co-branding them film with Chris Pratt's brand as a cross-over.
I think this is close, and the video touches on that as a characteristic that’s contributing to this, but there’s a motivation left unaddressed by the video that needs to be called out:
Reducing depth of field reduces the render resolution, which reduces the costs of digital processing and generation.
The simplest way to demonstrate this on a desktop computer is with the photography mode in games like Minecraft or Satisfactory or Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky, where the user can modify the Render Distance and Depth of Field at will. Load up the game viewing some planetary scene and enable the fps counter, then start changing the render distance; the closer you set it, the faster each frame will be generated. But the background will look defective and empty, so add depth of field, and now it doesn’t look so cheap — and when you take the photo, depending on the game, it may override your realtime render distance because it can take five seconds (!) rather than 1/60th of a second to generate that frame at 20 megapixels.
I think that the shift towards low depth of field in movies is, in part, a reflection of cost pressures, especially in 99.9% CG movies like Quantumania. And I think this is where Avatar beats out the competition for pure CG worlds in this video, because it renders at full resolution. It must have cost significantly more to produce than Quantumania (yep, $250m > $180m). I wonder how much of that difference was due to rendering the entire movie with a cheapness DoF blur. If nothing else, shadow rendering is so much of the difficulty of CG, that it could plausibly alone be the reason.
(I think that low depth of field is also currently popular because mobile phones lack it, and so producers are consciously or unconsciously selecting for an experience that is distinct from what they might film on their own. Depth of field is a very cheap form of escape.)
I think that is the wrong lesson to take away from the video. As the video emphasizes, DoF is a tool that can be used to achieve an intended effect in story telling.
Main thrust of the video is that these days these tools are predominantly being used for convenience of post-production and cost cutting at the expense of immersion and story telling.
Please refrain from calling someone sharing thoughts that we may or may not find interesting as "vomitting". If you don't like it click away or formulate sensible criticism that others can follow.
I for example thought the films from my youth were fake as heck for the most part and liked movies that came out one or two decades prior. Meaning my own criticism I had as a 16 year old certainly didn't have anything to do with "the magic of my youth", but with the actual choices made during the production of films.
For me it's mostly the characters and the narratives that feel "less real" than they used to. Something about seeing the same actor, in the same role and doing the same things, but 30 years older doesn't really sell the realism. Similarly, a new actor in an old role doesn't really either. We've lost a lot of novelty, real life is much more spontaneous whereas movies are increasingly contrived.
business exist to extract value aka money from people as efficiently as possible.
of course it's going to devolve to slop, they want money not realism or contrivance.
I have the opposite reaction in many cases. When we switched to 4k Blu-ray, I found it difficult to get immersed in many movies because they mostly looked like I was watching the shooting of a movie. Everything looked like a newsroom. Increases in fidelity don't make things more real, they uncover bad acting. My preference was to watch 720p24 movies on a plasma TV (or theatres back in those days)--I wasn't looking for a VR-like experience, rather a visual book reading. Another really weird one was The Hobbit at 48fps.
Expectations change, now 1080p24 seems better--but I suspect this has a lot to do with compression. Even with 4k a typical level of compression on streaming platforms takes away the texture and feeling of a scene.
I love the thread about Barry Lyndon. I’ve seen it for the first time recently and it is clear there is no talent, or rather no money, to create something so earnest and opinionated. The problem isn’t film, isn’t digital, isn’t the ironic dialogue of modern blockbuster, isn’t lack of art sense, it’s all of the above. It is clear that film, and any other creation today, is soulless, aims at the common denominator, there is no strong opinion, no auteurship. You see that in blockbuster film, blockbuster game design, blockbuster art even. In software.
Call me old and grumpy but there is a real sense that this data- and money-driven approach is the lowest, most sterile point for artistry and creativity. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is the antithesis of the relentless pursuit of revenue and efficiency. You do not have art when you need not to offend anyone but sell the most units. When art is just another product out of the industrial line.
> isn’t lack of art sense, it’s all of the above. It is clear that film, and any other creation today, is soulless, aims at the common denominator [...]
That's a problem with what you seek, rather than what is created.
There are lots of films and other creations being made that are the exact opposite of soulless, and does not aim for the common denominator.
Yes the big blockbuster movies are typically predicable sequels with limited inspiration. But that's what the audience wants. If Barry Lyndon premiered this year it wouldn't be a blockbuster hit, I am sure.
So you need to put in some effort, and not just go on the highway and complain it's not an exciting drive.
It’s facile and frankly uninteresting to put the blame on the critic, in this case my comment. I don’t watch blockbuster movies, I enjoy the indie scene in music and video games. I know there is always a niche of earnest art if one looks deep enough, but that shouldn’t stop us from having a conversation about what is going on with our culture and where we are going.
In fact this ‘meh it is what it is, just ignore it’ is another manifestation of this culturally-low point we find ourselves in, unwilling to imagine a better world, to even try to push against the status quo.
We have gone through these phases multiple times in history, and periods of ‘renaissance’ owe everything to those unreasonable people that claimed “this is terrible, I shall do better!” rather than just shrugging it out.
You make a fair point about cultural conversation being important. I think that conversation is happening, but the focal point shifts from one generation of creatives to the next. It's an important part of cultural dialogue, not just reaching the same targets as previous works, but finding new targets, new mediums and methods of expression.
We saw the shift toward a more fractured landscape happen in music long before movies. If you grew up hearing the Beatles on mainstream radio, listening today might feel like a cultural low point. And that feeling isn't baseless. But treating the Top 40 as the whole of music ends up missing the new developments happening outside that narrow slice.
We're seeing similar shifts in film. The Blair Witch Project and Once Upon a Time in Mexico heralded the age of accessible digital filmmaking, leading to an indie boom that's still rippling out. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once showed that ambitious, effects-heavy filmmaking is no longer tethered to the traditional studio system. Those are the high profile bellwethers -- indie bands that sneak in a radio hit -- but I think they reflect the wider landscape of passionate creatives better than, say, the new Jurassic World.
So yes, blockbusters aren't what they used to be. But judging the health of the entire medium by looking at those is like judging transportation by looking at horse-drawn carriages after the arrival of cars. It focuses on what's leaving instead of what's emerging.
> It’s facile and frankly uninteresting to put the blame on the critic, in this case my comment.
Well in that case your critique failed at the gates.
If your problem is that other people don't like the things you think they should like, or that movie theaters shouldn't show "soulless" movies, then say that then.
> In fact this ‘meh it is what it is, just ignore it’ is another manifestation of this culturally-low point we find ourselves in
That's the exact opposite of what I was saying. There's good stuff out there being made. Seek it, support it.
I think you might be looking at the film through rose tinted glasses without the broader context. Kubrick's films had been nominated for 9 Academy Awards and won 1 (he was personally nominated 3 times) by the time Barry Lyndon started filming. (He had also directed a certain Spartacus.)
Warner Brothers were keen to bankroll whatever he wanted to do, even tolerating moving the country of production due to the Troubles.
He was given some artistic freedom due to previous commercial success - ie. a "data- and money-driven approach". He also really wanted to be making a Napoleon biopic, but financing was pulled when a similar film failed at the box office, so he didn't get it all his own way.
Barry Lyndon was only a modest commercial succes. So much so that Warner Brothers hooked him up with a much safer bet for them for their next venture. He was given unfinished manuscript of The Shining, from the wildy popular best seller King for his next project, which was also simpler to produce ie. "relentless pursuit of revenue".
TLDR Making films is expensive and needs to be a commercial activity, but every now and then there's a fortunate crossover of quality and funding. This still happens but you need to look out for it.
If one is shooting film, then they have to make visual choices during the shoot. Shooting with high range digital cameras and grading it later allows for delaying the decision.
The problem (IMO) is that more stakeholders then get involved in deciding what the look of the film should be. Good looking films make bold visual choices, and bold decisions rarely come from a committee.
I remember the 1960s Star Trek and Doctor Who had bad special effects, but had the story and acting that made up for it. The story made it real; now we have special effects with AI and supercomputers, but how good is the story? Writers and actors make the difference.
Hollywood acting is basically nonexistent these days.
You get Chris Pratt in to play "Chris Pratt in this situation".
60's Trek was cheesy, but at least they tried.
Yeah it's less about Chris Pratt's ability to inhabit and exude a character, as much as co-branding them film with Chris Pratt's brand as a cross-over.
I thought star trek had good effects, but doctor who was just terrible.
But I was young - and young people are visual but not aware of subtlety.
I also thought the original batman was an action show. Decades later I watched it as an adult and it was a comedy, and hilarious.
For me very few movies are interesting. They've become expensive soap operas.
Visionary directors like the cohen brothers, spielberg, scorsese, and the writers of that era have just given way to blandness it seems.
10,20 years ago you had the Matrix and Forrest Gump.
Today you have, for example, Jay Kelly and Die My Dear. Well produced soap operas. These movies are literally just...a run of the mill story.
And Im not cherry picking.
Vanishingly small number of movies today seem to have a unique vision or be compelling..at least to me.
They even managed to turn Star Wars from a space opera into a space soap opera.
It's about the new trend of shallow DoF in new movies vs old ones.
I think this is close, and the video touches on that as a characteristic that’s contributing to this, but there’s a motivation left unaddressed by the video that needs to be called out:
Reducing depth of field reduces the render resolution, which reduces the costs of digital processing and generation.
The simplest way to demonstrate this on a desktop computer is with the photography mode in games like Minecraft or Satisfactory or Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky, where the user can modify the Render Distance and Depth of Field at will. Load up the game viewing some planetary scene and enable the fps counter, then start changing the render distance; the closer you set it, the faster each frame will be generated. But the background will look defective and empty, so add depth of field, and now it doesn’t look so cheap — and when you take the photo, depending on the game, it may override your realtime render distance because it can take five seconds (!) rather than 1/60th of a second to generate that frame at 20 megapixels.
I think that the shift towards low depth of field in movies is, in part, a reflection of cost pressures, especially in 99.9% CG movies like Quantumania. And I think this is where Avatar beats out the competition for pure CG worlds in this video, because it renders at full resolution. It must have cost significantly more to produce than Quantumania (yep, $250m > $180m). I wonder how much of that difference was due to rendering the entire movie with a cheapness DoF blur. If nothing else, shadow rendering is so much of the difficulty of CG, that it could plausibly alone be the reason.
(I think that low depth of field is also currently popular because mobile phones lack it, and so producers are consciously or unconsciously selecting for an experience that is distinct from what they might film on their own. Depth of field is a very cheap form of escape.)
I think that is the wrong lesson to take away from the video. As the video emphasizes, DoF is a tool that can be used to achieve an intended effect in story telling.
Main thrust of the video is that these days these tools are predominantly being used for convenience of post-production and cost cutting at the expense of immersion and story telling.
Why link a reddit post linking a YouTube video? Are YouTube links banned on HN?
I would guess it would be so that you can read the comments.
mirror: https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE
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Please refrain from calling someone sharing thoughts that we may or may not find interesting as "vomitting". If you don't like it click away or formulate sensible criticism that others can follow.
I for example thought the films from my youth were fake as heck for the most part and liked movies that came out one or two decades prior. Meaning my own criticism I had as a 16 year old certainly didn't have anything to do with "the magic of my youth", but with the actual choices made during the production of films.
[dead]