Do Movies Kind of Suck Now?

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I was looking for a movie to watch but couldn’t find anything that looked interesting. I was wondering if movies aren’t as good now or if it is just me… then I came across a list of movies that came out in 1999 which included:

The Matrix
Fight Club
American Beauty
Being John Malkovich
Office Space
Magnolia
Cider House Rules
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Boy’s Don’t Cry
The Sixth Sense
The Virgin Suicides
The Blair Witch Project
Galaxy Quest
The Green Mile
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

Holy crap, these all came out in the same year?!?!

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#2

yea most have been quite horrid over the past decade. John Wick series has been decent and the new Beekeeper film was good.

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#3

I don’t think they’re any worse than before. But TV’s killing it. Even the average Netflix show is more entertaining than most movies. So I just think movies are finding their new voice now.

If it’s not Dune, I think movies is an excellent format for the stories small in life but big in heart, the indie gems that aren’t so indie anymore. Not all stories benefit from seasonal arcs.

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#4

Reminds me of an interesting story about movies in 1999…

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#5

I’m thinking of getting a beamer. Movies used to be controversial and therefore interesting.

#6

Tons of great movies still, it’s just that you won’t find them at your local multiplex. That’s all superhero films and the like.

I, too, much prefer TV series now though, like a novel vs a short story.

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#7

the studios don’t really even make “movies” anymore. they own IP that is repeatedly adapted into a form resembling a movie. when IP stops being profitable, maybe they’ll go back to it

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#8

I’m pretty sure that on the whole, they’re worse. I’d like to solely blame CGI but there are movies with no major focus on CGI which still suck pretty bad. I can think of a few great films in the last 25 years, but things have gotten pretty stale, and I think a word which was less common back then but has now become part of the culture which reflects the state of the union, is reboot.

If the trend towards frequent reboots of good or even mediocre prior franchises isn’t proof positive, I don’t know what is. Also, looking at something like Marvel movies which hit a high in the early 2000’s but are now mostly a joke without a punchline, a set of collector’s cups that have no discernable image even if you collect them all, it reflects a large part of what you’re seeing in entertainment as a whole.

A few talented directors, a few companies that still push the envelope, but mostly I’m bored with what I watch. In '99 I may have been at my prime for attention span and had a full interest in this, so I may be more invested in the titles you listed than the newer ones, but at the same time I think I have a pretty good handle on what’s entertaining and what is not, so I would confidently say the ratio of suck to gold has increased quite a bit towards the former.

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#10

I think that the pandemic took a big toll on the movie industry, and the investment in the movies also took a hit because so much revenue comes from the box office numbers. And in the past decade there has been an uptick in movies, tv shows, and limited series from streaming services, which do sort of compete with the box office in the new world. So it seems like capital has shifted from the box office to the home streaming.

For me personally, I watch a lot of movies, and I don’t think that there are as many high quality movies overall these days. There are still good movies, but sometimes you have to dig for them. The problem I see is that so many streaming services try to invest in movies to build their own catalog, and they even try to hire good directors, but you can see where the budget was cut, and it ends up being a lesser movie and a lesser experience.

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#11

I also remember watching a Mat Damon interview recently where he said the decline of DVD sales/rentals is a big reason too. So movies now HAVE to be ‘blockbusters’.

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#12

There used to be more chances taken on films, and it just doesn’t happen as much anymore. Things feel very formulaic now. On top of the big budget films of the era, the 90’s and early 00’s were prime for indie films.

A good question is, who is the Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, or Wes Anderson of this generation? Or is it all just algorithm based from here on out?

Edit: Also, I realize that asking who is the “…” of any generation will elicit some hot responses, but, those film makers tapped into a creativity and time and place that in in some ways helped define their generation of filmmaking, and at least early on, were not mainstream, or did not have a mainstream budget. So that is why I am throwing their names out there.

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#13

Erased

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#14

TL;DR: yes.
and they suck since 2010s.
movies turned distilled politically correct something without any trace of anything edgy.
that’s why i stopped wasting my time on them about a decade ago.
had enough of that sort of stuff in the USSR when i grew up.

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#15

Interested in going to see that new Christopher Nolan

What ?

Err movie.

Who’s Christopher what’s his name ?

Director. ,his latest is oppenheimer -

oppenheimer ?
Oh the doomy nuke movie

#16

While it is expected that the quantity of good movies will fluctuate from year to year, every year has a good set of movies. Therefore, I believe that it is not that a particular era of movies was better than the current state of things, but that we may just like movies from a particular era and can’t identify with what is current.

To double down on some of the things listed here, Barbie was really good, Infinity Pool was amazing, I cannot wait to see Poor Things and The Boy and The Heron, Saltburn was excellent, Nimona was just AAAAAAAH!!!, I thought Air was well done and pretty entertaining, and so was Tetris.

We should always keep in mind that when we look back at previous years, we tend to only list the films (or anything else) that made the biggest impact and conclude that those years were excellent compared to whatever is happening right now, and we do not take into account that the list is really small compared to the amount of shit films (or anything else) that was released. Someone in 1999 probably looked at the really short list the most important films 1976, compared to what was fresh in their memory in 1999, and concluded that there aren’t any good released in '99…

To give a bit of perspective on my comment, I am almost 50, didn’t care about comics as a kid so I have no investment in Marvel this or that, or anything that fuels people’s obsessions, so I think I fit the demographic that would could be saying “movies suck now”.

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#17

I will say that one of my favorite directors in the past 10 years is Jordan Peele. ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ were amazing, and ‘Nope’ was somehow as beautiful as it was scary and disturbing. I will watch any movie of his. And I really liked the updated Candyman, which he didn’t direct but did write.

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#18

Access to good (non Hollywood/blockbuster) movies is certainly much worse.
Nine times out of ten if I want to watch a movie it’s simply not available on any of the streaming services where I live. And these are movies that I’d typically be able to find at a well stocked rental store 15 years ago.

Even buying movies isn’t much of an option these days. Criterion and their retailers for example do not ship to destinations outside of north America. Whereas in the aughts, since dvd was so popular and cheap(including region unlocked players, which are stupidly expensive for bluray) and online shopping was starting to take off globally it really felt like I had easy access to all of human film history.

So sure there’s lot’s of interesting smaller films being made every year but it’s near impossible for me to actually watch most of them.

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#19

Maybe we’re just getting older and have become desensitized. Or maybe we’re just victims of the “golden age fallacy”. Personally I don’t think things have gotten any worse. I mean there sure as shit was a ton of hot garbage coming out during every decade of cinema’s history, but people tend not to remember the bad ones as they often leave us traumatized and bitter for having waisted a couple hours of our life. I’ll echo what’s already been said in that the television show series has become leaps and bounds better in the past couple of decades and the majority of the top all time reviewed shows have been created in the past 20 years, and with every year bringing us new shows that captivate our minds. Films across the world are also becoming more accessible and we’re all fortunate for that. I often wonder how many amazing films I’ve missed out on because they were released on the other side of the world? I use to spend a lot of time seeking them down, but haven’t had that luxury since adulthood really started kicking in.

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#20

yep, that

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#21

But that’s just not true, except for a certain set of films(big budget or films that are financial hits).

The access you’re talking about is filtered by streaming services, which is bad enough but really detrimental to diversity when they are also the ones funding the content.
I used to import a lot of weird foreign shows and movies on dvd and I was always delighted at how different they were, but nowadays if I put on a netflix show from indonesia, turkey, brazil, india or south korea - it still feels and looks like a netflix show. Everything is fucking orange and cyan.

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