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Not seen a decent 'modern' film for ages
Gusto Brunt
Posts: 12,351 Forum Member
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Maybe I am old fashioned but I prefer the old way of making films. There just seemed to be something about them that is more compelling than the stuff they make today.
Better plots, scripts and acting.
I think I could count on one hand the really good films I have seen over the last two years. I have made many attempts, but I just quit most new films within half an hour.
Maybe that is too premature but why should I waste an extra hour of my life if I am not getting the film's vibe.:p
I've tried to watch a number of films this year and most of them I have forgotten the titles, never mind what they were about and who was in them.
Recently I tried the new Star Trek film. I am a big fan of the original Star Trek and for me it's just superior in every way to the rebooted attempts.
But the new ST film this year, I gave up on it after 20 minutes. It was mind-numbingly dull, and looked cheap and rubbish. Bad CGI. Casting is also terrible. I mean seriously who ever thought Simon Pegg would make a good Scotty??? It's an insult to the original character and more importantly the actor who played him. Pegg even plays it as a skit. A joke. A ***s take.
Other rubbish films I made an attempt on were Ghostbusters, The Jungle Book, The BFG, Jason Borne, The Mechanic 2, etc. All dull. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
So it was back to a classic film last night, The Great Escape (1963).
10/10.
Better plots, scripts and acting.
I think I could count on one hand the really good films I have seen over the last two years. I have made many attempts, but I just quit most new films within half an hour.
Maybe that is too premature but why should I waste an extra hour of my life if I am not getting the film's vibe.:p
I've tried to watch a number of films this year and most of them I have forgotten the titles, never mind what they were about and who was in them.
Recently I tried the new Star Trek film. I am a big fan of the original Star Trek and for me it's just superior in every way to the rebooted attempts.
But the new ST film this year, I gave up on it after 20 minutes. It was mind-numbingly dull, and looked cheap and rubbish. Bad CGI. Casting is also terrible. I mean seriously who ever thought Simon Pegg would make a good Scotty??? It's an insult to the original character and more importantly the actor who played him. Pegg even plays it as a skit. A joke. A ***s take.
Other rubbish films I made an attempt on were Ghostbusters, The Jungle Book, The BFG, Jason Borne, The Mechanic 2, etc. All dull. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
So it was back to a classic film last night, The Great Escape (1963).
10/10. 0
Comments
I have some sympathy, modern films seem to be simple reboots or copies of old films that didn't need a remake in the first place.
The remake of the Italian Job was awful as was Flight of the Phoenix. Why for example did they need to remake Flight of the Phoenix? The old film had a great cast plot and the effects were even quite well done for the year.
OK I know, there were no women or ethnic minorities in it. White male cast so we can't have that.
Seems to be these days every movie has to have a tick box or right on PC correctness to fill or it won't get made, these films end up with a terrible cast poor plots and a political message that is as subtle as a dog dumping in the middle of a Wimbledon tennis court.
If the Great Escape were to be made today we'd have half the cast women with the baddies all white males and the good buys all black with a lesbian as the hero (one legged of course)
The jokes would be all right on PC Hollywood crap that no one outside the BBC or Guardian would find funny.
There just seems to be a lack of invention in Hollywood, I did enjoy the Martian it was well made but is really a remake of Robinson Crusoe, most of the humour and music references were from the book that were kept in (for example the Lord of the Rings bit which was made funnier by Sean Bean being there) and there in lies the problem.
Far too often films based on books do get changed for political reasons I mentioned above just to satisfy the tick box studio mentality.
Food for thought: The latest Dan Brown adaptation Inferno has become a sleeper hit and Sony's first "Blockbuster" since Spectre. Before it was even released in in the US, it has taken in $50 million (it "only" cost £75million to make so has almost made its budget back from overseas alone) and outperformed the likes of latest Jason Bourne:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2016/10/17/box-office-tom-hanks-inferno-may-be-sonys-first-blockbuster-since-spectre/#795bb4a67cd7
Now I don't know what people think of Dan Brown novels and I'm not here to discuss it. But does it perhaps indicate that there’s a big potential audience out there that want to watch something other than the reboots and comic book hero films? Hollywood please take note, you might make some money.
And the Great Escape. They certainly don't make 'em like that anymore (more's the pity ;-)).
I enjoyed Birdman, Bridge of Spies, Gravity, Inside Out, The Martian, Grand Budapest Hotel, Dope, Big Hero 6 and Tomorrowland. Many modern biopics are gripping - Theory of Everything, Straight Outta Compton, Get On Up.
TV is better in this day and age, however. It's better in my opinion because ideas and thoughts aren't condensed to 90 to 120 minutes. There is a lot more time to work with.
.....that is all.
Well of course! ;-)
I just like things to be as good as they can be. I'm very liberal minded really, I don't mind what genre something is long as its good. I just feel that Hollywood execs are scrapping the bottom of the barrel at the moment in their desperation to remake anything they can on the chance there might be tuppence in it. Further example: I heard they are apparently re-making Death Wish...it could be a masterpiece...but I somehow doubt it...
Hateful Eight is an interesting one, I quite liked it but it does seem to be a bit marmite for some. But at least it was something original ;-).
The Book Thief-never got around to watching the film but enjoyed the book, as it was yet again: something original.
but they had to fill that one up with black actors just to be politically correct , I'm surprised they didn't make Dre be played by a one armed female Irish Jew with a wooden leg.
No, even he doesn't make them like he used to 😟
They seem to throw a lot in there to appease critics of that type, no matter how dumb the film is. In fact I'm probably starting to see more PC type moralising and platitudes in sci-fi, action, and superhero films than in simply good well written films. Not that blockbuster films can't be intelligent and well written, but you know what I mean.
It's like "I know that we're doing gratuitously violent action films with hot women in them, but look, we've got messages in them too which gets us off the hook".
Lower budget or Indie films seem to tend to fare a bit better and tend to have more interesting ideas which leave you to think more. Not always, but you do find some great low budget films which put the big expensive CGI movies to shame in the writing department.
Probably true to some extent. As I get older I become less and less tolerant of musical interludes in films. You know the kind of thing: the central character goes out with his or her mates and we have a loud dance music soundtrack to a sequence of knocking back shots, dancing badly, falling over, someone being sick etc. In the past few weeks Bridget Jones's Baby and Bad Moms have both done this.
Neither was a particularly bad film (in fact Bad Moms is a pretty sharp comedy) but both would have been better without the musical montages. Or would the target audience have thought they were much worse without the hilarious music sequences?
;-)
Hollywood has sold out, they regurgitate the same films over and over again (how many Marvel films can they make before people realise they are watching the same story over and over again - having said that, people pay to watch Bond do the same thing every couple of years
I was watching a round-table, I enjoy watching actors talk about their craft, and it was interesting to hear them agree on the point that the best drama to be found, along with great acting, scriptwriting, production, etc., is on TV now.
ETA: That's not to say there aren't great films to be found, of course there are - I enjoy seeking them out too, many of which don't make it to the mainstream cinema, but there is also so much dross aimed at grown-up children.