Hacker Cinema
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
1992 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui
Blonde, bouncy Buffy is your typical high school cheerleader. But all that changes when a strange man informs her she's been chosen by fate to kill vampires.
3 positive1 negativefrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
The 99% trope thing has an associated concept of its own: fan service.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.
Was forced to watch the Twilight movies.
They named the child Renesmee...
Some criticism is valid. The movies are bad. I can’t speak for the books...but the movies are very bad. I think it was the 3rd movie that I’ll say is the 2nd worst movie I’ve ever seen.
There are plenty of things that teenage girls like that don’t fall in the category of Twilight. Buffy the Vampire Slayer just as an example. Very similar premise but executed with a great story and acting.
Twilight movies are just bad. It’s a valid criticism.
For context, I'm 34, and like many around here a bright teenager. One thing that I really missed was story coherency, the careful assembly of motivations, events, themes, and characters into a cohesive whole. I don't even know how to describe my standards for a good story as a youth, but they're wildly different than they are now, and in particular many of the things I enjoyed then I now consider incoherent nonsensical trash. Things like Star Trek Voyager, which I always found weak, but now I can explain that weakness, or Final Fantasy X, which merely slightly bothered me at the time, which I now realize is because it was so bad it managed to penetrate the thick fog of blissful ignorance I was living in, but only a little. On the other hand, many of the original Star Trek episodes actually make a great deal more sense to me now than they used to. (It's fun to read the Blish novelizations of them; without the campy 60s videography and terrible effects, the true quality of the underlying stories comes out more clearly.)
I woke up to this around 25 or so. It was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, of course, not the forgettable movie) that tripped this for me; I realized I cared far more about the characters than any campy horror show had any right to make me care, and I began to wonder why, and poke into the mechanics of how that was done. That turned out to be a longish and interesting journey.
(I know I've mentioned several media that aren't "reading" here, but it trivially applies there as well.)