Generational Decay of Quality - Rate of Quantity Increases

zegh8578 said:
I was an adorable little child. Seriously. My mother was very set on getting me done right, a little too much. My younger brother however, was when parents go "okay, we raised one, what a bother, the 2nd one gets to raise itself"
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Heh, that's textbook first-born-second-born syndrome.

As I get older what I notice about younger people is that, because their frame of reference is limited, and they don't remember a lot of the things I remember, they take things as they are now for granted. Thirty years ago some things about the world were better, and some were worse. The things that are better now, young people take for granted because they don't know any different, and that's good; but the things that are worse they also take for granted, and that's bad because young people can't recognize that those things are worse, and therefore they are unconcerned.

I'm sure I was the same way, but now I recognize the truth in the complaints older people always have about younger people. It's a difficult idea to express.
 
what ever you say.

But I still think its not good that someone knows better how to call for "help" on facebook then just using his phone to call the police directly.

- that really happend.
 
Stupid people have always existedm just because you can see them easily now doesn't mean that they are a new concept.
 
Walpknut said:
Stupid people have always existedm just because you can see them easily now doesn't mean that they are a new concept.
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''Invent something foolproof, and the world will find a better fool''.
 
UniversalWolf said:
Considered by whom? What I see is a glut of comic book movies and sequels. Some might be good and some might be bad, but it's all variations of the same thing. Not just in 2012, but every year these days. So maybe now is the Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, but that doesn't mean it's a great time for movies overall.
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Are you kidding? You're going to ask who considers the best latest blockbusters good movies? If you want to dissect a film by its artistic merit, don't ask about numbers. If you want to just approach a movie by its popular reaction.... google it.

The 3 that I listed WERE indeed all Comic Book Adaptations, but these are nothing new. Ever since 1989 (which, by the way, you included "the early 90s" in your assessment of a period that encapsulated and served as the cut-off for "good years for movies", so this is noteworthy) we've been seeing more and more Comic Book Movies. The major difference is that most of them sucked. Batman was a decent movie, but it was the first "good" so-called Comic Book Movie, and it was what popularized the idea that you could make a movie about a comic book story, and it could not suck. So, as a direct result of this, we saw MORE of these in the decades since. Most of them still sucked. I liked Batman, but I'm not blind to the fact that its age is showing. It's a dated movie, and it relies largely on its performances (which were excellent, don't get me wrong), and the final sequel to it was so loathed that seeing Batman in a movie again was largely detested, to the point that Batman Begins was met with groans overall, and reactions of "Ugh, not ANOTHER one". However the quality of the film proved those reactions wrong. The following The Dark Knight won over damn near everyone who saw it, and was praised as one of the best movies of all time. Not JUST best Comic Book Movie of all time. The Dark Knight Rises was just the latest in that tradition, and it's major shortcoming was having to follow behind SUCH a titanic favorite movie. It was otherwise an excellent film. Not just an excellent Comic Book film.

The same was true of Avengers, and The Amazing Spider-Man wasn't too dissimilar. Yes, these 3 were adaptations of comic book stories, but they were good MOVIES. I simply went with those 3 to illustrate that point; that we had 3 VERY phenomenal films in one year, which both had exquisite artistic merit, as well as did extremely well at the box office, and they were even "just Comic Book Movies".

Like it or not, the popularity of films is important to the quality of films we get in a year. If a crappy film is popular, it doesn't matter if that same year gave us a wonderful but unappreciated film. Sure, it might have been good, but no one heard about it, so that's not really "a good year" at all. Don't be so quick to dismiss popularity entirely (even if popularity is irrelevant, overall).
 
SnapSlav said:
Are you kidding?
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No. And The Dark Knight mostly sucked, sorry (Heath Ledger excepted). That's not even a shadow of a great movie. And remember the Lord of the Rings movies everyone loved a few years ago? Those mostly sucked too, and people are starting to figure it out now that the hype machine has been turned off. In contrast great movies inevitably increase in reputation as time passes. Time is what it takes.

I don't think I implied anything about popularity making a movie good or bad. Independence Day was utter garbage that made heaps of money, and The Shawshank Redemption was a masterpiece and a commercial flop. On the other hand, Goodfellas was a commercial success and appropriately so. I would say box office take has no relation at all to quality in either a positive or negative sense. This is especially true of opening weekends.

So again I ask, according to whom? If you want to say The Avengers was a great movie...well. To me "great movie" means it stacks up to The Godfather, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Casablanca, or Blade Runner. I'm still waiting for any comic book movie that good. Otherwise you just mean it's better than its contemporaries, which isn't saying all that much. Did The Avengers change your outlook on life? Did you shed tears for the ending of The Amazing Spiderman? I didn't think so.

And I'm not saying they were bad movies (Joss Whedon in particular has earned some artistic credibility over the course of his career), and I'm not saying a comic book movie couldn't ever be great. On the other hand, what I see is a bunch of cash-cows that are being slapped together as fast as possible with the intent of making as much money as possible the opening weekend. Comic book movies have built-in audiences who will pay to see them whether they're good or not as long as there are lots of colors and objects moving around the screen at a rapid pace. The people who make them generally don't care about what anyone will think of them in ten years, or even ten months. That's why it's normal nowadays to see an action movie open big and then immediately fade.

Judging 2012 as a whole is going to take time, but the big-budget movies probably aren't the best the year had to offer. That's my bet. I mean, Argo was fairly crappy, and look at the success that clunker has had. The best movie I saw last year was Moonrise Kingdom, and it's gotten very little respect.

Now if we're talking about pop music, I would say the 1980s were pretty bad. I have a nostalgic appreciation for some of it, but I definitely don't think it's very good overall. The late 1960s and the 1970s were both better. I stopped listening to most music some time in the 1990s, so I don't feel qualified to comment on what's been done since then in any general sense.
 
UniversalWolf said:
SnapSlav said:
Are you kidding?
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No. And The Dark Knight mostly sucked, sorry (Heath Ledger excepted). That's not even a shadow of a great movie. And remember the Lord of the Rings movies everyone loved a few years ago? Those mostly sucked too, and people are starting to figure it out now that the hype machine has been turned off. In contrast great movies inevitably increase in reputation as time passes. Time is what it takes.

I don't think I implied anything about popularity making a movie good or bad. Independence Day was utter garbage that made heaps of money, and The Shawshank Redemption was a masterpiece and a commercial flop. On the other hand, Goodfellas was a commercial success and appropriately so. I would say box office take has no relation at all to quality in either a positive or negative sense. This is especially true of opening weekends.

So again I ask, according to whom? If you want to say The Avengers was a great movie...well. To me "great movie" means it stacks up to The Godfather, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Casablanca, or Blade Runner. I'm still waiting for any comic book movie that good. Otherwise you just mean it's better than its contemporaries, which isn't saying all that much. Did The Avengers change your outlook on life? Did you shed tears for the ending of The Amazing Spiderman? I didn't think so.

And I'm not saying they were bad movies (Joss Whedon in particular has earned some artistic credibility over the course of his career), and I'm not saying a comic book movie couldn't ever be great. On the other hand, what I see is a bunch of cash-cows that are being slapped together as fast as possible with the intent of making as much money as possible the opening weekend. Comic book movies have built-in audiences who will pay to see them whether they're good or not as long as there are lots of colors and objects moving around the screen at a rapid pace. The people who make them generally don't care about what anyone will think of them in ten years, or even ten months. That's why it's normal nowadays to see an action movie open big and then immediately fade.

Judging 2012 as a whole is going to take time, but the big-budget movies probably aren't the best the year had to offer. That's my bet. I mean, Argo was fairly crappy, and look at the success that clunker has had. The best movie I saw last year was Moonrise Kingdom, and it's gotten very little respect.

Now if we're talking about pop music, I would say the 1980s were pretty bad. I have a nostalgic appreciation for some of it, but I definitely don't think it's very good overall. The late 1960s and the 1970s were both better. I stopped listening to most music some time in the 1990s, so I don't feel qualified to comment on what's been done since then in any general sense.
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Well for some people The Avengers is a great movie, and Bladerunner an amazing movie. And to some people the Avengers is mediocre, and bladerunner great. It's a matter of perspective. And I think we can all agree that superhero movies are more popcorn action than quality film making.
 
The Avengers is an entertaining movie. The Dark Knight saga is a bore of a series that tries to be deep and has delusions of grandeur while being marketed at the general teenager populace, kind of Bioshock Infinite actually.
 
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