Matt Collins
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Why Modern Movies Suck
- Thread starter CCTelander
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fisharmor
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Just wanted to point out that though I've been watching Drinker for years, I do not fully trust his recommendations.
His first miss was when he recommended Everything Everywhere All At Once and specifically said it wasn't full of woke propaganda. I am really not sure what movie he was watching. I mean, technically it went back to doing the bare minimum to entertain us enough that we might not spend the entire time actively thinking "this is propaganda", but it was very obviously there. It was worse by far than Andor, and Andor was egregious since it was an otherwise spotless outing that suddenly forced us to pay attention to gay chicks that did nothing to advance the plot and could easily have been removed from an already crowded cast of characters.
His second miss was Shogun. I don't blame him for calling that one wrong: It looked moderately entertaining and relatively non-woke. But I do blame him for neither reading the book nor watching the 1980 series prior to commenting. The only reason why I suffered through one entire episode is because Metatron also commented, and he brought the authenticity nazi flamethrower to his review and only commented about how he had nothing to burn. And there was a high degree of historic authenticity.
The trouble with that one, is that the woke is there, but it's hiding. Unless you've read the book and seen the 1980 offering, it comes across as an incredibly masculine show that doesn't pay much lip service to wokeness.
But if you HAVE read the book, you only need one episode to see that they fundamentally changed pretty much every character and that those changes all add up to a giagantic woke hairball. The entire thing is an incredibly competently polished woke turd.
There's a guy named Tod who has a channel on YT devoted to historic authenticity ( https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop ) and the interesting thing about him is that he also provides props for TV and movies. And he's very open about the fact that historic authenticity HAS to come second in a TV show or movie. It was irritating the first time I heard him say it, because of the number of Ladyhawkes that have been made over the years, where people who know something are screaming WHY DID YOU GET THAT SO RIGHT AND THIS OTHER THING SO WRONG... I used to be really into authenticity in movies prior to Tod explaining that you can't have every single retainer in a scene dressed the way retainers dressed - because if one guy has his totally historical bright yellow hood that he's so fond of, he ruins the entire scene. And a good authenticity nazi will view a TV show through that lens: get it right, but don't get it so right that it ruins the experience.
And 2024 Shogun did the authenticity thing very well - but ruined the rest of the story. And they ruined the story in a way that made it toe the woke line. It was kinda genius - it found a way to insert the woke garbage in a way that we wouldn't notice. Similar to how Everything Everwhere All At Once did it, but way more clever. Find some things that will make all the men happy, and use that as the topical anesthetic that lets them slip the needle in unnoticed.
His first miss was when he recommended Everything Everywhere All At Once and specifically said it wasn't full of woke propaganda. I am really not sure what movie he was watching. I mean, technically it went back to doing the bare minimum to entertain us enough that we might not spend the entire time actively thinking "this is propaganda", but it was very obviously there. It was worse by far than Andor, and Andor was egregious since it was an otherwise spotless outing that suddenly forced us to pay attention to gay chicks that did nothing to advance the plot and could easily have been removed from an already crowded cast of characters.
His second miss was Shogun. I don't blame him for calling that one wrong: It looked moderately entertaining and relatively non-woke. But I do blame him for neither reading the book nor watching the 1980 series prior to commenting. The only reason why I suffered through one entire episode is because Metatron also commented, and he brought the authenticity nazi flamethrower to his review and only commented about how he had nothing to burn. And there was a high degree of historic authenticity.
The trouble with that one, is that the woke is there, but it's hiding. Unless you've read the book and seen the 1980 offering, it comes across as an incredibly masculine show that doesn't pay much lip service to wokeness.
But if you HAVE read the book, you only need one episode to see that they fundamentally changed pretty much every character and that those changes all add up to a giagantic woke hairball. The entire thing is an incredibly competently polished woke turd.
There's a guy named Tod who has a channel on YT devoted to historic authenticity ( https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop ) and the interesting thing about him is that he also provides props for TV and movies. And he's very open about the fact that historic authenticity HAS to come second in a TV show or movie. It was irritating the first time I heard him say it, because of the number of Ladyhawkes that have been made over the years, where people who know something are screaming WHY DID YOU GET THAT SO RIGHT AND THIS OTHER THING SO WRONG... I used to be really into authenticity in movies prior to Tod explaining that you can't have every single retainer in a scene dressed the way retainers dressed - because if one guy has his totally historical bright yellow hood that he's so fond of, he ruins the entire scene. And a good authenticity nazi will view a TV show through that lens: get it right, but don't get it so right that it ruins the experience.
And 2024 Shogun did the authenticity thing very well - but ruined the rest of the story. And they ruined the story in a way that made it toe the woke line. It was kinda genius - it found a way to insert the woke garbage in a way that we wouldn't notice. Similar to how Everything Everwhere All At Once did it, but way more clever. Find some things that will make all the men happy, and use that as the topical anesthetic that lets them slip the needle in unnoticed.
fisharmor
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By the way, everyone should have this bookmarked:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/
You'd be surprised what you can just watch on some of these sites, with no obligation (presuming you're ad blocking, that is... I don't know what some of these sites look like without an ad blocker enabled.) And of course I'd have a VPN on, just for good measure. And before anyone gets upset... there's stuff on these sites that you literally can't find any other way, short of buying a VHS copy on ebay.
e.g. I just found out last night that Godzilla Minus One is streaming on Lookmovie now. I'm looking forward to watching that one just to see what a $12 million giant killer looks like.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/
You'd be surprised what you can just watch on some of these sites, with no obligation (presuming you're ad blocking, that is... I don't know what some of these sites look like without an ad blocker enabled.) And of course I'd have a VPN on, just for good measure. And before anyone gets upset... there's stuff on these sites that you literally can't find any other way, short of buying a VHS copy on ebay.
e.g. I just found out last night that Godzilla Minus One is streaming on Lookmovie now. I'm looking forward to watching that one just to see what a $12 million giant killer looks like.
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I haven't seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, so I can't comment on the quality of the Drinker's review.
But I have seen the new Shogun mini-series. I've also seen the old mini-series and read the book (several times for each). While the new series was disappointing and I didn't particularly care for it - unlike the Drinker and others, and in part due to its inadequacies when compared to the old series (which had its flaws, as well) - I didn't notice that is was "woke" in any significant way, so I have to agree with the Drinker on that point, at least.
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Seconded!
Even if you don't normally watch or like "Godzilla"-type movies.
It's not just a great "Godzilla" move - it's a great movie, period.
ClaytonB
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This phenomenon alone has killed my interest in 90+% of all movies ...
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
- Frederic Chopin
We've forgotten what a movie is. The movie industry has become obsessed with technical metrics, as if having the best audio equipment could make you a musician. No, music is fundamentally an artistic act... a skilled drummer can turn a pile of junk from a junkyard into a real drumset and play real drum lines on it. So, the master makes the medium, not the other way around.
A quasi-staged musical like Sweeney Todd is a masterpiece in my eyes, especially compared to just about any of the corporate ooze being squeezed out of Hollywood these days:
As the amount of detail that can be gathered by state-of-the-art cameras increases, Hollywood as an institution has forgotten how to convert all that detail into a finished piece of cinematographic art. The eye can only take in so much detail and when you present the viewer with crackling sharp 8k resolution corner to corner on every single frame, you're overwhelming and dulling the effect. Overwhelmingly detailed shots have their place... just not in every single frame of a 2.5 hour movie. Detail is all about focus... the eye goes to where the detail is. If you render a face with high-detail and high contrast, then you should reduce the detail and the contrast around it in order to cause the viewer's eye to go automatically to the face. Note that the face is already the element of interest in the shot, but proper detail-management reinforces and harmonizes the entire viewing experience with the reality of how the elements in the frame are situated. This is why most 90's blockbuster films look 10x better than just about anything on offer from Hollywood today despite having objectively inferior film equipment and delivery formats.
Hollywood has also forgotten the importance of playfulness. I think this is possibly the single biggest loss. Many hit movies have been made over the years on a shoestring budget, and what the movie lacked in high-end filming equipment, stunning sets, etc. they made up for with raw creativity, combined with a precocious sense of playfulness. A lot of cult movies fit this description because the love that went into making the movie is visible in the final product. The creators took what they had and made something truly good even from the inferior raw materials available to them. The more "serious" the "mission" of Hollywood (in delivering USG propaganda), the less fun movies are. You can try to paper it over "in post" but the reality is that the audience can inevitably sense that the vibe is off. That a movie needs to make money is not the issue... it's that Hollywood has completely forgotten how to take risks and so every single movie has to make money (or else). That kind of slave-mentality will inevitably show through in the final product. Try watching a hit Bollywood movie some time with subtitles... you will be literally blown away at how far superior the simple enjoyment of the viewing experience is compared to just about any of Hollywood's shiny, digitally-chromed comic-movies. Bollywood still remembers how to have fun. Hollywood has clearly forgotten.
When you can't have fun, when you can't be playful, you can't experiment with effects, you can't try to do something truly original, you can't play outside the box because, by definition, going outside the box is an unquantifiable risk. But just about every great movie from the 90's and early 00's took at least some risk, often taking outrageous risks (e.g. The Matrix). Sin City seamlessly blended the comic and live-action. It was mind-bogglingly good -- we have way more capability to create those kinds of effects today, but somehow can't seem to produce anything interesting, new, creative and fun. Into The Spiderverse is a recent example of a movie that kind of continued in this vein, mixing traditional comic-style rendering with truly amazing digital renders that genuinely broke new ground. By the way, that movie is a great example of how to manage extremely high detail. The movie is "clean" in the sense of the critique videos above but if you're going to do clean, this is how you do it. You can't just wipe everything with a bleach cloth and leave every surface like some kind of ray-tracing algorithm benchmark... you need to introduce real rendering elements that bring the frame to life, and you can't rely on a single shtick, you need to mix it up and keep the creative juices flowing so that the viewer is able to experience surprise again and again throughout the film, rather than having a single "new trick" drilled to exhaustion for 2.5 hours straight. All of these things are so basic I don't understand why they even have to be explained, to be blunt. But somebody has to...
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
- Frederic Chopin
We've forgotten what a movie is. The movie industry has become obsessed with technical metrics, as if having the best audio equipment could make you a musician. No, music is fundamentally an artistic act... a skilled drummer can turn a pile of junk from a junkyard into a real drumset and play real drum lines on it. So, the master makes the medium, not the other way around.
A quasi-staged musical like Sweeney Todd is a masterpiece in my eyes, especially compared to just about any of the corporate ooze being squeezed out of Hollywood these days:
As the amount of detail that can be gathered by state-of-the-art cameras increases, Hollywood as an institution has forgotten how to convert all that detail into a finished piece of cinematographic art. The eye can only take in so much detail and when you present the viewer with crackling sharp 8k resolution corner to corner on every single frame, you're overwhelming and dulling the effect. Overwhelmingly detailed shots have their place... just not in every single frame of a 2.5 hour movie. Detail is all about focus... the eye goes to where the detail is. If you render a face with high-detail and high contrast, then you should reduce the detail and the contrast around it in order to cause the viewer's eye to go automatically to the face. Note that the face is already the element of interest in the shot, but proper detail-management reinforces and harmonizes the entire viewing experience with the reality of how the elements in the frame are situated. This is why most 90's blockbuster films look 10x better than just about anything on offer from Hollywood today despite having objectively inferior film equipment and delivery formats.
Hollywood has also forgotten the importance of playfulness. I think this is possibly the single biggest loss. Many hit movies have been made over the years on a shoestring budget, and what the movie lacked in high-end filming equipment, stunning sets, etc. they made up for with raw creativity, combined with a precocious sense of playfulness. A lot of cult movies fit this description because the love that went into making the movie is visible in the final product. The creators took what they had and made something truly good even from the inferior raw materials available to them. The more "serious" the "mission" of Hollywood (in delivering USG propaganda), the less fun movies are. You can try to paper it over "in post" but the reality is that the audience can inevitably sense that the vibe is off. That a movie needs to make money is not the issue... it's that Hollywood has completely forgotten how to take risks and so every single movie has to make money (or else). That kind of slave-mentality will inevitably show through in the final product. Try watching a hit Bollywood movie some time with subtitles... you will be literally blown away at how far superior the simple enjoyment of the viewing experience is compared to just about any of Hollywood's shiny, digitally-chromed comic-movies. Bollywood still remembers how to have fun. Hollywood has clearly forgotten.
When you can't have fun, when you can't be playful, you can't experiment with effects, you can't try to do something truly original, you can't play outside the box because, by definition, going outside the box is an unquantifiable risk. But just about every great movie from the 90's and early 00's took at least some risk, often taking outrageous risks (e.g. The Matrix). Sin City seamlessly blended the comic and live-action. It was mind-bogglingly good -- we have way more capability to create those kinds of effects today, but somehow can't seem to produce anything interesting, new, creative and fun. Into The Spiderverse is a recent example of a movie that kind of continued in this vein, mixing traditional comic-style rendering with truly amazing digital renders that genuinely broke new ground. By the way, that movie is a great example of how to manage extremely high detail. The movie is "clean" in the sense of the critique videos above but if you're going to do clean, this is how you do it. You can't just wipe everything with a bleach cloth and leave every surface like some kind of ray-tracing algorithm benchmark... you need to introduce real rendering elements that bring the frame to life, and you can't rely on a single shtick, you need to mix it up and keep the creative juices flowing so that the viewer is able to experience surprise again and again throughout the film, rather than having a single "new trick" drilled to exhaustion for 2.5 hours straight. All of these things are so basic I don't understand why they even have to be explained, to be blunt. But somebody has to...
Last edited:
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Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much? - Critical Drinker
{Chris Williamson | 22 March 2025}
Critical Drinker is a movie critic, an analyst of modern entertainment media and a YouTuber.
What happened to Hollywood? Despite bigger budgets than ever, shows and films are struggling to thrive. Thankfully, Critical Drinker points to some pretty obvious and some not so obvious key reasons for why there is such a disconnect.
Expect to learn all about what is happening with the new James Bond shows, if the woke message is really dead in Hollywood, Critical Drinker’s thoughts on the Oscars, if Star Wars is redeemable or if it is completely left in the past, if audiences hate strong female characters or if its bad writing, what the fuck George R.R. Martin is doing instead of writing the last book, and much more…
0:00:00 - Future Of The James Bond Franchise
0:06:02 - Was The Loki Series A Mistake?
0:08:25 - Stages Of Parody In Movies
0:11:13 - The Impact Change In Culture Has Had On Movie And Tv Industries
0:15:34 - Why The Gaming Industry Is So Profitable
0:18:30 - Do Books Still Have A Cultural Impact?
0:26:17 - Can Movie Theatre's Survive With Streaming Services?
0:29:38 - Have We Seen The End Of Rom-Com And Comedy Genres?
0:36:23 - Will The Legality Of It Ends With Us Change Future Productions?
0:41:57 - Making Of The New Snow White Movie
0:44:07 - Is Meghan Markle's New Show Heavily Curated?
0:47:59 - Are The Oscar's Still A Huge Event?
0:55:43 - Is Star Wars Redeemable?
1:04:11 - Navigating Streaming Networks
1:10:06 - Critical's Upcoming Projects
1:10:58 - Where To Find Critical Drinker
{Chris Williamson | 22 March 2025}
Critical Drinker is a movie critic, an analyst of modern entertainment media and a YouTuber.
What happened to Hollywood? Despite bigger budgets than ever, shows and films are struggling to thrive. Thankfully, Critical Drinker points to some pretty obvious and some not so obvious key reasons for why there is such a disconnect.
Expect to learn all about what is happening with the new James Bond shows, if the woke message is really dead in Hollywood, Critical Drinker’s thoughts on the Oscars, if Star Wars is redeemable or if it is completely left in the past, if audiences hate strong female characters or if its bad writing, what the fuck George R.R. Martin is doing instead of writing the last book, and much more…
0:00:00 - Future Of The James Bond Franchise
0:06:02 - Was The Loki Series A Mistake?
0:08:25 - Stages Of Parody In Movies
0:11:13 - The Impact Change In Culture Has Had On Movie And Tv Industries
0:15:34 - Why The Gaming Industry Is So Profitable
0:18:30 - Do Books Still Have A Cultural Impact?
0:26:17 - Can Movie Theatre's Survive With Streaming Services?
0:29:38 - Have We Seen The End Of Rom-Com And Comedy Genres?
0:36:23 - Will The Legality Of It Ends With Us Change Future Productions?
0:41:57 - Making Of The New Snow White Movie
0:44:07 - Is Meghan Markle's New Show Heavily Curated?
0:47:59 - Are The Oscar's Still A Huge Event?
0:55:43 - Is Star Wars Redeemable?
1:04:11 - Navigating Streaming Networks
1:10:06 - Critical's Upcoming Projects
1:10:58 - Where To Find Critical Drinker
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2010
- Messages
- 39,968
Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Completely Forgettable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vK1LY1KC_w
{The Critical Drinker | 21 July 2025}
Some of the biggest movies in theatres right now are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, and they'll be forgotten within weeks. How did it get like this? When did we stop creating iconic movie moments, memorable characters and quotable lines that are remembered for generations, and will we ever get it back?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vK1LY1KC_w
{The Critical Drinker | 21 July 2025}
Some of the biggest movies in theatres right now are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, and they'll be forgotten within weeks. How did it get like this? When did we stop creating iconic movie moments, memorable characters and quotable lines that are remembered for generations, and will we ever get it back?
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