I have the opposite issue. I tend to only enjoy older films. Recent films tend to have this digital colour-graded look and a style of editing (millions of 1 second cuts) that make them pretty much unwatchable for me.
I really love films that take their time, both in plot and character development, as well as in how shots develop to establish the scenes. I also have a passion for photography and for me that’s a really big part of films. I want to see beautiful photographs that took a lot of time and experience to set up (and wait for the right moment, in the case of outdoor scenes). I love practical effects that were built and painted by hand, explosions rigged with real explosives, much more than CGI.
I think there is an issue with attention spans though. The modern films that I mentioned above seem to be ideal for people with short attention spans, whereas older films tend to be boring for these folks. This makes it hard for films to appeal to both audiences!
This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.
Wow thanks for this! It’s so helpful to learn about and have a language for describing why these new movies feel so wrong to me. I’m going to watch this after work and share it with my film club!
Fully agree about the attention span stuff. I kind of think TV drove it initially, especially animation.
After a season or two The Simpsons started to pick up pace, and for its time it was kind of frenetic. South Park picked up that ball and ran with it. Then when Family Guy came along I thought this is nuts, and I wondered if there wasn’t an active effort to erode attention spans on a large scale.
There are plenty of other examples outside animation, but I picked those because they’re still well known.
I consider myself fortunate to have seen the progression first hand. And to have had an older boss way back who had an infectious love for well made art, particularly in films.
I found Sinners to be nice and slow moving for most of it, plus Pluribus the TV show is slow and but l both are cinematic. They are fewer but not gone.
I have the opposite issue. I tend to only enjoy older films. Recent films tend to have this digital colour-graded look and a style of editing (millions of 1 second cuts) that make them pretty much unwatchable for me.
I really love films that take their time, both in plot and character development, as well as in how shots develop to establish the scenes. I also have a passion for photography and for me that’s a really big part of films. I want to see beautiful photographs that took a lot of time and experience to set up (and wait for the right moment, in the case of outdoor scenes). I love practical effects that were built and painted by hand, explosions rigged with real explosives, much more than CGI.
I think there is an issue with attention spans though. The modern films that I mentioned above seem to be ideal for people with short attention spans, whereas older films tend to be boring for these folks. This makes it hard for films to appeal to both audiences!
This video makes some great points about how movies don’t feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don’t give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.
Wow thanks for this! It’s so helpful to learn about and have a language for describing why these new movies feel so wrong to me. I’m going to watch this after work and share it with my film club!
Fully agree about the attention span stuff. I kind of think TV drove it initially, especially animation.
After a season or two The Simpsons started to pick up pace, and for its time it was kind of frenetic. South Park picked up that ball and ran with it. Then when Family Guy came along I thought this is nuts, and I wondered if there wasn’t an active effort to erode attention spans on a large scale.
There are plenty of other examples outside animation, but I picked those because they’re still well known.
I consider myself fortunate to have seen the progression first hand. And to have had an older boss way back who had an infectious love for well made art, particularly in films.
It at least seems like “the classics” were attentive to the craft. When good direction, lighting, angles, music come together I’m enthralled.
There’s some survivorship bias to that. Most of my favorite movies are the 1970s, but that’s also the best of an entire decade.
I’m sure there’s an equal number of good contemporary movies, we just don’t know which yet.
Spoiler: it’s ‘The Substance’.
I found Sinners to be nice and slow moving for most of it, plus Pluribus the TV show is slow and but l both are cinematic. They are fewer but not gone.