The Less Talked About Things That Ruin Modern Media

[XYZpdq Jr.]

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I spent holy week watching religious movies and this is Ben Hur during a scene at night and in basically a dungeon. It's not that the image has been enhanced, the movie is like this, it had very vivid colors. Many other movies of the time were like this too. They knew how to light a scene for the audience to know it's night, yet still being able to see what was happening.

Dark movies is just a choice and a really bad one.;

I'll be fair that SOME is TVs that default to weird settings. Like I finally swapped from VGA to HDMI and suddenly it was an eclipse until I turned the brightness WAAAAAAAAY the fuck up

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

If you want to see a movie made in 1965 that looks better than pretty much anything in the last 20 years, check out The Sound Of Music. One of the newer blurays looks absolutely amazing. You'd think they had inferior technology 60 years ago. Props to whoever was responsible for the new transfer, though. That's probably a lot of work, too.

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

On the subject of everything feeling the same, visual and stylistic choices like typefaces, color schemes, etc. have all been homogenized into this minimalist, lightweight "modern" look. I think vidya is the biggest example of this but the same applies to things like graphic art, tech UI, websites, book covers, you get the idea.

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I miss interfaces like those so much.

 

[Nigger Respecter]

Yeah I can’t stand the lighting in modern movies. Everything is dark and yellow. Doesn’t matter what genre it is, doesn’t matter if it’s TV or a movie. They all look like a dogshit prestige Showtime show trying to ape Breaking Bad

 

[Captain Syrup]

I think it started with Fincher's Zodiac.

Look, I don’t know what traumatic event happened to Fincher in a well-lit room, but his characters look like they haven’t seen a lightbulb since Kennedy got shot.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

When I say I'm tired of women, I mean this.



I haven't yet watched the show, but I'm sure anything about the Nautilus is meant to have Nemo as the main protagonist. Yet, look at the poster. You'd think that the lady, whoever she is, is as important as Nemo. You see the Nautilus, her, and then, Nemo.

Compare that with the poster for The Mummy. Like Nautilus is not called "Nemo", this ain't called "Rick", yet he and Evie are the protagonists, and Evie is in a second level in the poster composition because this movie is about featuring Brendan Fraser.



This show is from UK, so I have the feeling it's some insane requirement that you can't have men being the sole protagonists (even when Nemo ain't even white), so they must put the lady on top as well.

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

I was watching the Warriors for the first time yesterday and it hit me how clean a lot of modern shows and movies look. Like, all the environments look sterile and plastic, they don't have any scratches, dirt or grime on them, and the characters and their clothes manage to remain pristine no matter what. In a lot of old stuff, even if it wasn't always consistent, the sets/costumes always had that scuff and roughness that made it feel like these were people living in a place rather than actors on a set. Early in the Warriors, Swan gets his face bruised and cut a bit and that injury remains for the rest of the movie. The character's jackets get ruffled, wrinkly and dirty throughout the movie. All the locations, even when empty and 'clean' look like there's been people walking through and interacting with it before the characters got there.

I see some clips of that Last of Us adaptation and even in the apocalypse everything looks too clean.

 

[No-Eyed Square Guy]

I see some clips of that Last of Us adaptation and even in the apocalypse everything looks too clean.

Fading professionalism.
Production designers, set dressers, wardrobe, continuity ("script girl" in the olden days), etc., are lazier or just doing less, partly for budget reasons (though budgets are nominally higher) and partly out of failure to preserve the professional culture (by hiring young girls for obvious reasons, and nepotism, and "DEI"). Directors who can't sustain their own crews don't have access to competent production staff. The average movie looks like shit and breaks immersion in a hundred subtle ways.
Lost art. Like America "forgot" how to go to the moon.

 

[Porcupine]

Oh one thing that bothers me is in period movies the clothes feel too custome-y instead of real and lived in.
It totally takes out the immersion when you know a character must have worn a dress a thousand times, specially when they have fallen in hard times, but it still has immaculate colors and fabric.
Now, there are many factors that come into play, but I think what is most important is time and budget.
Working in the creative field, I've always pointed at the project management pyramid to explain to my clients what can affect the end quality of a project: time, budget and scope.
(On a side note: it has been expanded by some and it has its limitations, but this pyramid is a simple way to explain this).
Hollywood mostly doesn't have a problem with scope, but budget and time are often a problem. A movie could have a big budget but a small percentage goes to costume design. They can have time to finish the outfits but the material quality could be better. Some people can produce amazing outcomes with cheap materials, but not many have this talent.
Often, they don't have time nor budget, at least not one required to make the outfits truly tell a story themselves and they just become... Something that is just there. Not a language to silently tell a story to the audience.
Now, here comes a problem that I see often, paired with what I said above: horrendous art direction. Many, many of the issues pointed here can be partly attributed to art direction. Lack of research, art directors having their heads up their asses, etc. People often forget how are direction pairs everything up, and a bad one can make a project stand out for the wrong reasons.
I am not saying that the costumes have to be 100% accurate to the period of time. In the end, a movie is a piece of art and it can take its liberties. However, it has to make sense with what you are trying to communicate.

 

[Althalus]

Like, here's something that would actually be interesting: What if instead of "war is bad," do a game that gives a serious examination of why war and conflict happen. Not the standard "because power hungry men at the top force everyone else to go along," but go into the gritty details: the hard-to-reconcile cultural differences, people's egos being at play, communication failures (both the technical kind and the "people got mad and started shouting" kind), and point out the real reasons peace is hard to achieve without just saying "a big demon is behind it all."

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is one of the few shows along this vein. Between the actual nuanced characterization of individuals, and the detailed historical/political commentary + the storytelling style being relatively slow-paced, it probably would not be made today. It is a fairly long series with a few movies and over a hundred episodes + a prequel series, but if you have the time I would 100% recommend it. There is a much newer sequel series also but I cannot vouch for that as I never watched it.

 

[Idiotron]

Nerds who have never done anything physical in their lives being completely in charge of action sequences.

I fucking hate modern action scenes in Hollywood.
They hardly use stuntmen anymore and just replace actors with pixels.
Even if they use stuntmen, it's just a "here's the job, now fuck off", nobody physical is a consultant on these things.
Because of that, they don't know how a human body moves or how durable it is.
People get hit with bats in the face, get into car crashes, slam against walls, and then just get up and keep going like it was nothing.

The peak of that was probably Wonder Woman 1984 where it's also a middle aged woman writing and directing with full creative control, the action made no sense.
Gal Gadot ties up some crooks and drops them onto a car from like 20 feet, car gets squashed, dudes are fine.
During a car chase, Chris Pine breaks a window in his car and then crawls on his chest through the window with the sharp glass, grabs it too, not even a drop of blood from that.

In the fucking Roadhouse remake, it was a complete cartoon.
They even replaced Gyllenhall with CG for basic stunts that any stuntman can do for $500.
His character gets damaged so much, his fight with McGregor at the end was like someone playing Tekken.

Nobody who ever got punched in the face is part of the creative process and it just feels so fake.
It's like a bunch of virgins making a porno, they don't know anything.

 

[The Hardest R]

Everything has to be flanderized or else people will lose their shit over it. Everything is so finely tuned for social media shareability that these attempts at being epic or viral come off as fake and gay. I’d like to ask who this shit even is for but given how much money the entertainment industry is losing, it’s safe to say that it isn’t really for anyone these days.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I was watching the Warriors for the first time yesterday and it hit me how clean a lot of modern shows and movies look. Like, all the environments look sterile and plastic, they don't have any scratches, dirt or grime on them, and the characters and their clothes manage to remain pristine no matter what. In a lot of old stuff, even if it wasn't always consistent, the sets/costumes always had that scuff and roughness that made it feel like these were people living in a place rather than actors on a set. Early in the Warriors, Swan gets his face bruised and cut a bit and that injury remains for the rest of the movie. The character's jackets get ruffled, wrinkly and dirty throughout the movie. All the locations, even when empty and 'clean' look like there's been people walking through and interacting with it before the characters got there.

I see some clips of that Last of Us adaptation and even in the apocalypse everything looks too clean.

I bet it's something as stupid as "girls like KK don't like dirty sets"

 

[Dead Lion]

A cancer that’s causing a ton of hurt and lost rescues is the slap dash way stuff is made these days. There’s just no planning involved. If I was in charge of a movie production i wouldn’t allow a single frame to be shot until the script is finalised, sets, cast and crew are booked and so on and so forth. But this days it’s all a madhouse when the script is often either being written or re-written when principal photography starts. Then there comes the test-screenings which usually leads to another re-write, expensive re-shoots and then during post-production there’s the process of pixel-fucking where VFX are continuously reworked many times over.

After all this redoing the end product is going to come out way too expensive and very muddled. I don’t know why studios prefer to overspend on post-production rather than allow for sufficient pre-production.

I mean I know why it’s because shareholder primacy enforcing infinite growth and prohibiting long term investments. The money people aren’t too keen on spending money on a project that might take years only for nothing to appear. With this modern approach they at least have something to write off on the taxes.

In addition I guarantee that modern screenwriters can’t rotate an apple in their head so playing out a movie based off a script alone in their head is impossible for them.

Like, here's something that would actually be interesting: What if instead of "war is bad," do a game that gives a serious examination of why war and conflict happen. Not the standard "because power hungry men at the top force everyone else to go along," but go into the gritty details: the hard-to-reconcile cultural differences, people's egos being at play, communication failures (both the technical kind and the "people got mad and started shouting" kind), and point out the real reasons peace is hard to achieve without just saying "a big demon is behind it all."

If you can stomach weeb shit ‘the saga of Tanya the evil’ has all of that. Especially the novels. Not so much the beginning of the conflict since that’s a rather cut-and-dry territorial dispute but the way it progresses and escalates and what it does to the participants.

Good times.

 

[GilaCutter]

It's not that the image has been enhanced, the movie is like this, it had very vivid colors.

Technicolor, my beloved~

 

[BiggestKai]

I've watched Gareth Edward's new movie Havoc earlier today and I have three things that absolutely ruin modern action movies.

1. Awful CG - If you can't afford a stunt crew for a car chase or explosives then don't have them in your movie.
2. Digital blood/gunfire - Digital blood splatters look awful(if you ever watch the movie check the parts where Mia uses a meat cleaver) and gunfire makes your shoot fest look bad.
3. "Kinematic camera" - where the camera like moves and swooshes all around the place in a martial arts fight to give the impression of a stronger attack. Like when someone grapples with someone or aims a gun the camera has to do this harsh 90 degree swivel, I fucking hate this so much and Gareth has been going overboard with it since Raid 2. If you've ever watched a recent korean or chinese action movie they keep doing this and it muddies any martial arts scene, and I'm very rapidly developing the view point that western abundance of cutting during action scenes may be better because it's done to mask shitty choreography, while this ruins what seems to be decent choreography. Well that and shaky cam.

 

[Crybaby Xianghua]

Personally, I hate media that tries too hard to be artsy fartsy, and just comes off a too bleak, too boring, too tone deaf, too preachy, or worse, the creators and crew members trauma dumping their personal life problems on to audiences, in disguise of fictional story telling.

I call those type of artsy media "The creator's barely disguised therapy session". I see this a lot with this in cartoons like "Steven Universe" or "She-Ra in name only" Netflix cartoon. I mean, out of the all the people you trauma dump on, why children, of all fanbases? Kids are known to be ditsy and selfish a lot of the time. They have their own problems. Don't give them anymore grief in their lives.

Suddenly, I think I have some new respect for MST3K and Rifftrax quality schlock cinema ever since. At least they don't pretend to be something their not, and can be unintentionally funny at times.

 

[ZealotCrustacean101]

Talking about YouTube channels, I would say its the way people talk, there's something about the cadence that feels less personal and more processed for me, this is something you rarely see in small channels but in bigger ones there's an unspoken standard when it comes to the way people speak there or something.

One of the things I used to admire was how the internet showed everyday people trying their best to achieve their dreams, even if they had humble or scuffed beginnings, however passion has been replaced with endless trend chasing, I would like to present male "sages" from Twitter as an example, but they are part of an even bigger problem, everyone wants to be the next guru on their field, there's this hyper competitive behavior fostered by modern society (If you don't climb you are sliding down) which leads to countless of seemingly good advice/insight being wasted by figures that don't understand the essence of it.

In other words, social media influencers try to manipulate your emotions in other ways (such as editing, framing, video presentation) to make their message more "impactful" or trick you into thinking you are actually learning something, this creates a lack of meaningful/false insight of the world and is one of the root causes why doomers exist, and they are multiplying fast, yet it doesn't matter, there will always be an influencer willing to make them whole, like a sick patient swallowing pills just to live a little longer. The pattern will repeat again.

Where did it all go wrong? Maybe in nowhere, this is how we are coping with a world that is too small for us, yet so well known inside out, there are no boats sailing towards the virgin lands of America, there's no adventure to look up to, only endless activities that repeat themselves until you realize the loop, you try to escape it, yet there is no "escaping" it, this is life, real life, somehow more than ever ignorance is a commodity towards building a happier life.

Also yeah I went on an unrelated tandem, thanks for reading my blog

 

[Doctor of Autism]

I find the whole complaint about everything feeling the same fascinating since I am pretty sure its a modern feeling due to how much access we have now to newer stuff and some people consume media so much that they pick up on tropes and cliches that can get tiresome.

It's probably not even intentional since this probably has always been a thing since not every classic or story has survived through time but now with a whole library of shows, movies, and such you can easily notice derivatives far more often.

Anyway for me, I feel a thing that can ruin stuff is when a story tries too hard to be pretentious or gets overly ambitious, which are both different things.

Being pretentious can feel that way mostly in stuff that is pretty low brow and has a low brow tone to it. For example, the last two films of the recent Halloween trilogy and Exorcism Believer, directed by David Gordon Greene gets like this. Halloween Kills for example, tries to have this big message about mob mentality and how being riled up in a mob could harm innocent people and turn people crazy, yet the movie this is a sequel to was a pretty straightforward slasher which while it did deal with themes like PTSD and trauma, it wasn't beating you in the head with it. This is even worse with Halloween Ends where it tries to be this indie romance story and subvert expectations with a story of "what makes a serial killer" while at the same time trying to be this big epic finale between two legacy characters, and these new characters are very cookie cutter.

Exorcism Believer is a strange case because the original Exorcist dealt with many mature topics, but Believer feels like a bog standard exorcism movie that deals with these topics in a way the director doesn't really understand, which is how different faiths handle exorcisms, hope, and the importance of community meanwhile the film keeps hammering those ideas home while not letting you know the community well with boring or stupid people at best and at worst assholes. There's also how these messages don't work because the different faiths represented are a Haitian faith and different sects of Christianity but the exorcisms don't really work. Hell the hope message is immediately ruined because the demon wins in hte end because the father chose to be selfish and tries to sacrifice the other child while unintentionally condemning his child to hell then we get a hopeful montage afterward.

Like if you're trying to handle real world topics or themes, maybe at least understand the themes you're going to do, or don't put them in something set up to be lowbrow and still engage in the same lowbrow behaviors of previous installments.

As for ambitious, its hard to say clear cut examples, but there are films or shows that are made with some good intentions but want to do so many things different or subversive that drags the film down under the weight of ambition that just never leaves anything satisfying. Like when a director/writer's first project is their super big dream project but lack any experience in the medium they are making the project in rather than trying to build up experience. I think the best example of this is films/shows made by internet critics that had no prior experience in actual filmmaking and then want to tell these super big stories without understanding how to really do it. Hell fan films also fall under this problem too.

 

[Slideshow Bill]

What sticks out so much to me in modern media, especially shows, is when a moment is created specifically to go viral on social media. It's such an insult to my intelligence. I know that people behind the scenes were thinking "That moment is going to be so gif-able". I couldn't escape that dance scene from Wednesday and I never even watched the show.

Personally, I hate media that tries too hard to be artsy fartsy, and just comes off a too bleak, too boring, too tone deaf, too preachy, or worse, the creators and crew members trauma dumping their personal life problems on to audiences, in disguise of fictional story telling.

I call those type of artsy media "The creator's barely disguised therapy session". I see this a lot with this in cartoons like "Steven Universe" or "She-Ra in name only" Netflix cartoon. I mean, out of the all the people you trauma dump on, why children, of all fanbases? Kids are known to be ditsy and selfish a lot of the time. They have their own problems. Don't give them anymore grief in their lives.

Suddenly, I think I have some new respect for MST3K and Rifftrax quality schlock cinema ever since. At least they don't pretend to be something their not, and can be unintentionally funny at times.

It reminds me when teachers would have personal life problems and then take them out on the students during the lessons.
>and that bitch Jefferson Davis got the Southern states in the divorce