We can have higher-definition video than ever before, more streamlined workflows. We can involve more non-straight white males in the process, have more diversified pools of co-conspirators. There can be a greater sense of political urgency from certain sectors, an unabashed willingness to tackle various hot-button issues head on. There can be a greater propensity for being outrageous, tapping into pulse-pounding dread or letting our freak flags fly in various ways, going down the rabbit hole, getting “meta,” weirdly unpleasant, etc. The lower overhead of many productions can mean we can get more personal and intimate, if need be.
But all of this is for naught if being attentive to the minute-by-minute fluctuations of a narrative and its emotional core isn’t done well, or somehow the whole endeavor is rendered moot on a conceptual level, or the movie is just plain trivial. There’s no short cut around this. No amount of star power or “things looking good on paper” can necessarily cancel it out.
I’d posit that if movies “before” (in general sense) had a tendency to suffer from meaninglessness, now it’s almost as if movies tend to suffer from too much meaning, but it’s of the wrong kind.
Am getting a new TV this week, after holding out with my more compact one for a long time. But I tend to watch movies less and less, it seems. This could just be a phase, but it’s never felt more easy and natural to put off watching things, sometimes even very good things from bygone eras.
This is a brilliant post, it should be re-iterated:
Wondering, as far as apparent feature-length advertisements go, how Barbie stacks up against The Wizard and Mac & Me.Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jul 22, 2023 12:32 am The Barbie movie is so bad.
It is essentially a lecture about Barbie and feminism and body image and patriarchy for two hours, while doing sight gags about toys at human scale, a few silly movie parodies and lots of 4th wall-breaking wink-wink stuff. On one level it's like being trapped in a SNL sketch that won't end. On another level it felt like an Ayn Rand novel for Democrats. They're supposed to be dolls but every character is either a straw man or a sock puppet and they're all here to talk to YOU about feminism.
There is some half-hearted attempt to overlay the standard action beats of a Hollywood three-act film over all this but it's beyond flimsy. Oh, we'll get Will Ferrell to do that scenery-chewing cartoon baddie thing he does and he can... whatever. A chase or something. Who cares, not important. Then the ghost of Barbie's creator turns up to provide some additional cultural context because fuck the movie, we've got a thesis going here. By the end the characters are just standing around monologuing the director's blog posts at the audience.
