A bonus feature of Edge of Tomorrow is that you get to see Tom Cruise die over and over and over again. Which is kind of fun if Tom Cruise gets on your nerves sometimes.
Charles, what you are seeing is a country and industry looking inward for inspiration and only finding a crappy photocopier. Studios, weary of shareholder returns, do not want to take risks on untried concepts. Viewers, bombarded with an avalanche of content like never in our lives, are less willing to risk viewing something that is unfamiliar. This is adding up to a culture that no longer takes risks, that looks to remake past achievements and never thinks to pioneer new art. You can see this in the last 15 years of remake movies. How many movies with the audacity and originality of The Matrix are made these days? But we poop out a new superhero movie on a reliable budget and schedule. High risk vs. low risk. This is the beginning of the death of one of America’s last remaining original exports: our creativity channeled into entertainment. Perhaps we’ll soon get used to looking to China for emerging, provocative art.
Additionally you can see this nationwide fear of risk-taking in the ever-increasing ages of our gerontocratic politicians and in our billionaires’ childlike fascination with the cosmic dreams of 1960s space travel. This simply is not a country that wants a different, creative, clumsy, beautiful new future. They want to play the greatest hits for the rest of our time atop the superpower pile. They want electric cars to mitigate the guilt of destroying the wild for their suburban fantasies. They want so badly to prove that the hippies were wrong this whole time. Such a shame.
The movies have always been this sort of tense amalgamation of art and business, but these days it's looking like a zero-sum game where business is winning. I wanted to say that having Amazon run a movie studio is kinda like having robots write music, but as ill-suited a movie studio as Amazon is, clearly this is a broader industry phenomenon.
And I think you have perfectly expressed the disgust and disdain I feel about this billionaire space race we have today. There's an extraordinary lack of imagination to these "great men's" space ambitions. I just can't help but think of all the fossil fuels that have to be burned to power one of these joy rides.
A bonus feature of Edge of Tomorrow is that you get to see Tom Cruise die over and over and over again. Which is kind of fun if Tom Cruise gets on your nerves sometimes.
Charles, what you are seeing is a country and industry looking inward for inspiration and only finding a crappy photocopier. Studios, weary of shareholder returns, do not want to take risks on untried concepts. Viewers, bombarded with an avalanche of content like never in our lives, are less willing to risk viewing something that is unfamiliar. This is adding up to a culture that no longer takes risks, that looks to remake past achievements and never thinks to pioneer new art. You can see this in the last 15 years of remake movies. How many movies with the audacity and originality of The Matrix are made these days? But we poop out a new superhero movie on a reliable budget and schedule. High risk vs. low risk. This is the beginning of the death of one of America’s last remaining original exports: our creativity channeled into entertainment. Perhaps we’ll soon get used to looking to China for emerging, provocative art.
Additionally you can see this nationwide fear of risk-taking in the ever-increasing ages of our gerontocratic politicians and in our billionaires’ childlike fascination with the cosmic dreams of 1960s space travel. This simply is not a country that wants a different, creative, clumsy, beautiful new future. They want to play the greatest hits for the rest of our time atop the superpower pile. They want electric cars to mitigate the guilt of destroying the wild for their suburban fantasies. They want so badly to prove that the hippies were wrong this whole time. Such a shame.
Jort @2 and @3, fabulous comments!!!
The movies have always been this sort of tense amalgamation of art and business, but these days it's looking like a zero-sum game where business is winning. I wanted to say that having Amazon run a movie studio is kinda like having robots write music, but as ill-suited a movie studio as Amazon is, clearly this is a broader industry phenomenon.
And I think you have perfectly expressed the disgust and disdain I feel about this billionaire space race we have today. There's an extraordinary lack of imagination to these "great men's" space ambitions. I just can't help but think of all the fossil fuels that have to be burned to power one of these joy rides.
Wow, there's another period crime piece starring Don Cheadle? How dare they copy that incredibly specific detail?
The Matrix invented the "Chosen One" trope.
Groundhog Day with Aliens owns the word "Tomorrow".
Hollywood is obviously creatively bankrupt.