Hacker Cinema
Knives Out
2019 · Film · 131 min
Part of Knives Out Collection
Directed by Rian Johnson
When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead at his estate just after his 85th birthday, the inquisitive and debonair Detective Benoit Blanc is mysteriously enlisted to investigate. From Harlan's dysfunctional family to his devoted staff, Blanc sifts through a web of red herrings and self-serving lies to uncover the truth behind Harlan's untimely death.
23 positive6 negative16 neutralfrom 45 commenters
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47 comments on Hacker News
My parents got a Samsung TV. At Christmas, I turned off all the data collection features (and some abysmal AI face filter that was ruining the latest Knives Out film). It very annoyingly started prompting to reenable them regularly.
I think it's fine as a metric if you read it correctly.
100% means a film is extremely agreeable with whatever audience it has managed to get to. For major releases this can ultimately mean it's actually lacking anything particularly bold or interesting. This results in things like Frost/Nixon or Knives Out having higher ratings than broadly acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive or even There Will Be Blood; I know which ones I'd be more likely to put on with my extended family even if I don't especially like them.
But yeah, it's amazing how many people still don't grasp it after decades of getting angry about it.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating.
Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers.
Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy.
The question is, "Why?"
First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others.
Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car).
We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent.
And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight.
My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit.
The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them.
I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot.
My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations".
They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect.
They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves.
So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about.
Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake.
"There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven
And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied,
"She fucked him before she fucked him."
I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.
I think the movie industry can still tell good stories, I just think that many movies don't optimise for this and instead optimise for revenue (across cinemas, streaming, merch, TV, etc).
There have been some amazing films in recent years with plenty of effort put into their craft. Villenueve's Dune and Arrival come to mind in Sci-Fi, things like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Knives Out, these are all films that I think have been made with a deep appreciation for the craft, without trying to appeal too widely and lose their depth. I guess you could argue that some of these are telling from "weird angles", but I'm not sure I'd agree, and even if so I think those differences bring significant value rather than being gimmicks.
One of the last films I saw before Covid was Knives Out and an elderly couple were sitting a few seats over. The woman kept repeating the lines to the man and explaining things that were happening in the movie. I can of course appreciate the situation but this is the reason I don't want to go to a theatre often except for the big movies.
The bear case for Netflix is once again the “DropBox problem”. Streaming services is becoming a feature not a product.
When Disney creates a movie. It can monetize the movie across its entire “flywheel” - movie theatres, video on demand, licensing to third parties, toys, theme parks etc.
It’s streaming content has already made a billion in the box office before it ever hits streaming. Streaming is additive.
Netflix paid millions of dollars just for the rights to the “Knives Out” sequel for instance only to make a pittance in limited release and then go to streaming.
The same is true for the other players.
That’s not even to mention Apple, Amazon and Google who are playing a completely different game.
Someone should tell Rian Johnson that subverting expectations isn't an achievement in itself. By showing how the death happened early on in Knives Out he moves the focus from "who killed Harlan" to "will Marta be caught" and so for a long part of the movie, it's not even a murder mystery.
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.
Just a quick glance at Letterboxd....
Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Both Knives Out movies
Parasite
Nope (probably just in the "good" grouping, not great)
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That's, uh... just from the "popular this week" screen. And only the ones I've seen, so I know they're good. But I'm pretty sure all those are last five years, or close to it.
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Digging back to 2018 and later (we can say 2018 counts since 2023 just started, right?):
Annihilation
Sorry to Bother You
High Life
Midsommar
Uncut Gems (god it's so good)
Jojo Rabbit
The Lighthouse
The Green Knight
CODA
Spontaneous ([EDIT] It seems very dumb but wow is it a gut punch, when you start to think about what you're watching and make some connections to real life)
Red Rocket (small-scale brilliance)
RRR
Watcher
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I just realized I misread you as asking for 5 good ones from just one of the last 5 years, not 5 total from the last 5 years, but I think that gets the point across? Despite my leaving off a whole bunch that may be more taste-specific, not having watched even 1/3 of the films from that span I have good reason to believe are good, not exhaustively mining that timespan (I bet I could double the size of that list without changing how I was selecting them), and also omitting a bunch of more-popular movies that I think were at least decent.
[EDIT] Hell some years you could get to 2-3 good ones just by looking at what A24 produced that year, nothing else.
> Why do films insist on explaining things that don't need to be explained.
Yeah an utterly baffling trend. I hadn't linked the two but you're right of course the same trend to add explanatory scenes and to simplify open plot points.
Worse still when they retroactively change the plot! Or scenes to fit a sequel.
Some major examples that come to mind is Avatar being changed to accommodate a sequel - in an entirely unnecessary way by adding a post credit scene in the style of MCU.
Last of Us 2 just replaying incorrectly last of us scenes and then the remaster being changed to suit.
Sometimes I think it's simply lazy writing or when a story outdoes the talent of its creator.
I did like the reveals in knives out because they genuinely add new info and suddenly many dynamics that were rich and understandable became very different yet rich and understandable.
> It’s clickbait because it asserts something surprising and extreme about a movie that is generally considered to be very good
"Bad writing" is not suprising or extreme, just an opinion. And "very good" is subjective — we're talking about movies here, i.e. art. This isn't a review of programming languages where there's an objective reality of pros and cons to consider.
I haven't seen Glass Onion, but I saw Knives Out and while it was a decent film, I think comparing it to the Beatles or the Internet is a bit silly. It sounds like you really enjoyed the film and are just annoyed that someone else didn't.
I was careful to speak in general terms. I am absolutely not expressing an opinion about that movie at all.
I saw and enjoyed the first installment of Knives Out. I don't have a beef with the filmmaker, or the series, or the actors, or the genre.
I'm just saying that detective fiction in general should follow a certain formula and if you stray too far away from it, most of the time, it doesn't turn into a wonderful new recipe but simply fails. In general.
Is it the case for this film in particular? I have no idea!
I found Glass Onion's writing far from “lazy”.
> Instead, he used the most basic and lazy trick in the book: withholding information for no good reason whatsoever … With Glass Onion, our main perspective character was performing. And we didn’t know because the movie refused to let us know.
No, the movie is playing with your expectations around genre-typical knowledge gaps.
In classical murder mysteries like the original Knives Out, our knowledge gap is loosely aligned with the protagonist: they arrive at the scene knowing roughly what we know (“there's been a murder”), they outpace us to see through the unreliable witnesses and extend their knowledge gap through brilliant detective work, until the denouement where they explain what was in plain sight all along.
In Glass Onion the knowledge gaps are numerous and they're sliced, layered and reordered:
- There's a large initial knowledge gap between us and Benoit. He is not just ahead of us: he has a 50% head start. This gap slams shut halfway through the movie by backfilling information on how Benoit really came to receive his invitation to the island.
— A new gap opens: the knowledge we now share with Benoit is not yet known to the guests on the island, and we get to enjoy this with him as a reward for the initial “deceit”. From this point we have caught up with the protagonist, at the small cost of our poor reviewer feeling cheated at having interpreted simple unreliable narration as the movie _refusing_ to present the facts to him in tired chronological order.
— Yet another gap opens because for the first time in the film — only halfway through our murder mystery! — we know who was murdered but we don't yet know who murdered them. This presents us with the classical murder mystery knowledge gap that the reviewer wanted to exist from the film's start.
— The writers pepper extra knowledge gaps that provide more unknowns, some of which are new (who “killed” Miles in his murder mystery game?) and others that exist to provide coherence with the original Knives Out. (Who invited Benoit? Is the murderer of all victims the same person?)
> This gets back to something Hitchock [sic] talked about regarding tension. If you watch a scene where two people talk at a restaurant for five minutes then a bomb goes off, it’s boring for 5 minutes and shocking for an instant. If you watch a scene where someone plants a bomb under a table, then two characters show up and talk for five minutes, you’re wondering the entire time if the bomb will go off. It makes the conversation much more dynamic.
Glass Onion achieves far more dynamism than this! The murder-mystery format itself provides the “bomb under the table”: we start from the first minute knowing that a murder will be committed. When halfway through that “bomb” has not gone off yet the dynamic tension is unbearable. It's released with the first bomb's detonation, only to be replaced immediately by a new fizzing fuse (“but the murderer must then know that there's an imposter!”).
And if you watched Knives Out, you probably know that the movie is taking you down the wrong path before it flips the narrative.
Knives Out is an interesting edge case there. It was shot almost completely on digital (on scene was on analog) but was post-processed by the Director of Photography to achieve the look of analog recordings. A process he has spent many, many hours perfecting.
This Polygon article touches on some of the process and considerations: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography
I'm not sure if it's because of growing up watching most things online with limited bitrates, but I realized I dislike film grain a lot. I know that to a certain degree, film grain helps humans resolve finer details. Similar to using noise shaped dithering to allow you to hear more than the theoretical dynamic range in audio or see a larger range of color tones in a picture. But I found that on certain 4K uhd blurays, if I am watching on a small screen the film grain looks very obnoxious. The problem doesn't exist when watching on a big TV, so I know it's not related to projecting on a screen. I really dislike when directors go out of their way to add artificial film grain. Will media players eventually allow users to adjust the film grain that is added back in?
This reminds me of Steve Yedlin's, cinematographer on everything from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Knives Out and its 2022 sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, who showed through research that film can be completely emulated using digital techniques and mixed digital and film shots during Star Wars.
https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography
https://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/MatchLensBlur.html
https://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html
Lets see... the most recent comedy movies I've seen...
Knives Out (2019) was probably the one I enjoyed the most.
JoJo Rabbit was trying too hard IMO, but I still smiled/laughed throughout it. WW2 is kinda overdone at this point (though serious films like Downfall are worth revisiting)
Free Guy was fine? Apparently "The Suicide Squad" also counts as a comedy. I guess Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were also fine. Maybe other people are tired of comicbook / superhero movies, but really I'm personally only tired of the "Marvel Formula" (and Deadpool / The Suicide Squad strays pretty heavily from the formula). Going back a bit further is "Jumanji"...
There's a lot of flicks / comedy films out there. Nothing is quite as good as Airplane but I'd say Knives Out is on-par, maybe even better than Clue (1985).
I don't really like the "Despicable Me" series, but my nieces really wanted to watch "Minions: Rise of Gru" and I actually enjoyed that one. (My nieces love this series, so I can say that I've watched all of it and its mostly trash. But Rise of Gru actually got me to laugh)
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I'm no critic. I enjoy just a basic flick now and then. Honestly, I'd rewatch "Knives Out" more than any Adam Sandler movie from the 90s or even Austin Powers. 90s era comedy just didn't mesh well with me, despite me growing up at that time. I do have a soft spot for the dry 80s stuff with Leslie Nielsen, and I guess I really liked Jackie Chan's action/comedies through the 90s and 00s.
I dunno, if I think "90s comedy I enjoyed", I think of Men in Black or Aladdin? Nothing in the list that this author wrote.
Comedy moved to Youtube and TikTok and big-Hollywood can't compete with more tailored, specific, comedy.
What's the funniest thing I've watched recently? ProZD, CarbotAnimations, CalebCity, Door Monster.
They're quite specific to my tastes (Anime, Video Games, and Dungeons and Dragons), that most others wouldn't get. But there's simply no way that a big Hollywood / general production can make a joke as specific as Door Monster and/or CarbotAnimation skits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCEZ2hIcUW0
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Longer bits of comedy can be found in longer-form Youtube videos, such as Oversimplified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRmOWcWdQAo
I don't think any of these online cartoons or Youtubers have much mainstream appeal. But they're funny enough for me.
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I also seem to remember some relatively mainstream comedies out there: Harley Quinn was pretty good (though that tickles my taste in DC Superheroes). Knives Out was absolutely hilarious. But I admit I don't watch too many movies in general.
The Big Short was funny (though inaccurate to the history of the time), if people want a more recent somewhat political flick.
I spotted a Proton address in the movie Knives Out (2019). It was used by the villain, naturally.
I found a year old article making a similarl argument:
https://theconversation.com/films-made-for-netflix-look-more-like-tv-shows-heres-the-technical-reason-why-160259
It reminded me of the work that the cinematographer on Knives Out did to kill the silly idea that "digital cameras" couldn't do "film look".:
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography
Knives Out wasn't a Netflix production, was it? I believe Netflix only acquired the rights to the planned sequels after the first movie's release.
It's not always CGI. They are using LED lighting panels to create the exact lighting conditions they want. Some movies and shows are using giant overhead panels to create hyper-focused idealized conditions.
A lot of times, it is overdone, but in a movie like Knives Out it helped with the indoor scenes.
Recently:
- Everything Everywhere All at Once - The Black Phone - The Northman - House of Gucci - Knives Out - Little Women - A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - The Shape of Water
The blockbusters are such a huge part of the cultural landscape so that it’s easy to miss all the other film out there. But there’s really a lot of it!
Or you can just buy a mid-range digital mirrorless or DSLR camera with a sufficiently wide FOV lens and then crop the photo. Most decent cameras offer an in-camera aspect ratio crop, or various grids, if you want to have the composition assistance.
A current sony mirrorless camera will blow the XPan out of the water in every possible sense unless you're shooting VERY high quality, VERY low ISO film, and the exposure time required for working with such a low ISO film means you probably lose whatever resolution advantage you might have gained.
Keep in mind this page was written over ten years ago: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1/
Note that a Canon 40D, an APS-C camera that came out in 2007, had the image quality of medium format film, with greater dynamic range.
On the full-frame front, a Canon 1Ds hit theoretical maximum signal to noise ratio at 100 ISO, and at ISO 800 still had better S/N ratio than ISO 50 film: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.signal.to.noise/index.html
Film is dead. It has worse resolution, dynamic range, sensitivity, and perhaps most importantly: workflow.
Film is so dead, in fact, that in cinematography, people shoot in digital and then apply postprocessing to make it look like film. Just as one can make a pristine recording sound like vinyl, one can make a digital camera look like film, because in both cases, digital is vastly technically superior.
I'm betting quite a few "I shoot 35mm film" snobs walked out of the theater after seeing Knives Out thinking to themselves "film's not dead, it's still better."
They wouldn't be alone; Steve Yedlin screened shots done on film and then digital, post-processed to look like film, and industry pros couldn't tell the difference: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography
> To my mind, letting Abrams double-down on swerving back to his plot in episode 9 was their biggest management sin when it comes to creating a coherent plot arc.
Abrams was an Executive Producer on Ep 8 still and was supposedly in the room for all of the plot development. He personally could have avoided most of that swerve had he been paying attention. Admittedly, he thought at the time it was Trevorrow's problem because Disney didn't fire Trevorrow from Ep 9 until the "last minute", but there's a lot of interesting questions left about what Abrams even thought the "resolution" could possibly be even with Trevorrow at the helm. He was still an Executive Producer in a role that should have been preparing for the trilogy as a whole to succeed.
It takes a village to make a movie and all that, and I'm not personally blaming Abrams, though it sounds like it, I think Disney management should have been more involved too. The whole Trevorrow thing reeks of Disney management failure and bad contract planning. (Between that and the shenanigans with Lord/Miller over Solo…)
I think Abrams made the best movie for Ep 9 that he could have given the time, budget, and resources he had to meet a "set in stone" holiday release date. I think he did the best he could with what Johnson left him, and honestly I don't think anyone could have resolved Johnson's plot twists well and still have felt like Star Wars. He had good ideas in absentia, but they weren't "Star Wars".
(Admittedly, I thought Ep 8 was the entire wrong genre for Star Wars: it was a Vietnam War movie in a franchise built around World War 2 metaphors/aesthetics. I also had a big issue with the "Three Billboards problem" of Poe in Ep 8. In my eyes he's unreedemably the villain of the film, and the character is entirely broken beyond repair in Ep 8. But also, admittedly, I haven't liked any of Rian Johnson's films that I've watched [inc. Knives Out; and I especially hated Looper].)
Well I consciously notice that Knives Out is a pretty good movie, so I think the conversation of what we subconsciously notice or not in this case is pretty silly.
My favorite example of this is the fact that in the film "Knives Out", the looming oil painting of Harlan (the murdered patriarch) was actually just a green square all throughout filming - the oil painting itself was digitally comped in during post.
Is Knives Out still a good movie? Yes. Would it have been possibly, perceptibly better if the actors had a real eyeline to work with on that painting, or the camera work was done with the cinematographer being able to see the real painting through the lens? Maybe.
No? There are more wealthy people today who earned it without being bootstrapped by an insanely good starting position than ever before, but to suggest that it's the _majority_ is to ignore everything people have been complaining about in the streets for the last two years. A huge predictor, if not the single biggest predictor, of wealth is still just whether or not your parents are wealthy, especially at the top. E.g. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/. Even the wealth-x report that I assume you are thinking of points to people like besoz and buffet and zuck, all of whom argue a very clear "wow I got super lucky to be born when and where I did and to whom," message. Buffet literally calls it "winning the ovarian lottery."
Do some people overcome their initial bad luck and generate wealth for themselves? Of course there are some. But it is not "the majority of those with vast wealth." That's head-in-sand silicon valley tech utopia wankery.
I thought the movie Knives Out did a great job of parodying this "Rich people are ENTREPRENEURS that EARNED IT!" idea.
If you're an Agatha Christie fan, I highly recommend the 2019 "Knives Out" movie. Writer/Director Rian Johnson is a fan, and the movie does it justice.
I think many people don't reflect on the show's messaging beyond the surface level "catchy costumes and violence in a game show" aspect (which honestly wasn't even new when Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed it in Running Man).
The social critique of Squid Game isn't the squid game. It's the world outside the game. It's why so many of the participants not only volunteer but also volunteer to come back after having already experienced it. The world outside the game show is portrayed as so bleak that hundreds of people would rather compete in a life-or-death "game" that promises fairness and a life-changing cash reward.
And the critical message of the show is that this world outside the game is not significantly different from ours. The game is a grotesque exaggeration of a get rich quick scheme but there are plenty of examples for people hoping to beat the odds or being willing to scam others for promises of great fortunes (look no further than the way the GameStock pump and dump was framed as a proletarian revolution until it was revealed most of the stock movement was the result of established investors jumping in to cash out on the gullible masses still tweeting "diamond hands" memes as the tide was starting to turn).
The cheap gore horror sells the show, but the implications of the story it tells, what people are willing to do to themselves and others for the promise of a carefree life, and how characters from all walks of life can end up in the gutter and devoid of hope, is why people dig their claws into it for more than just a few viral marketing memes. It speaks to the zeitgeist, especially during a pandemic that has repeatedly demonstrated failures of government and society, and economical interests being placed above the individual's well-being.
Before 2020 many people likely believed that their country would come together in a crisis like this, that people with power would forego their own interests for once an help out or that the wealthy wouldn't do less than even the bare minimum to contribute to the society that made them rich. In 2021 I don't think there are many people left having any such illusions about the systems they exist within.
So yeah, detached rich people betting on the dying and desperate like horses in a race strikes a chord with people right now. A show casually presenting a social reality in which poor people are willing to participate in such a "game" even more so. Note that this show's success on Netflix followed both The Platform and Snowpiercer (or the serialization thereof) as well as Parasite and Knives Out. There's a common thread between the themes of these films and Squid Game managed to strike the nerve.
What rotten tomatoes considers the "best films of all time" is laughable across the spectrum.
Some gems from the top 10:
4. Black Panther
6. Parasite
7. Avengers: Endgame
9. Knives Out
10. Us
Its surely just coincidence that the half of the best films ever made in human history were produced in the last 5 years.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/
Future movie spoilers alert! And it’s actually true isn’t it! :-) Apple won’t let bad guys use their hardware; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/apple-wont-let-bad-guys-use-iphones-in-movies-says-knives-out-director.html
I recommend watching Knives Out- Daniel Craig plays the kind of detective you want to see. (It helps that he is not the sole point of view character.)
> It doesn’t make Bing look cooler, it just makes the TV shows look cheap
Product name-drops are just one thing, the corporate placement also cares about how it is used and by whom.
Apple says you can't put an iPhone in a villain's hand and indirectly gives away the plot of Knives Out.
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
For sure. Or look at things like Knives Out or Thor: Ragnarok. Solid comedies both and mass-market successes.
The notion that people can't be funny anymore just because they can no longer use particular groups as punchlines is just lazy. A great example is Get Out. It's a lot of things, but it can reasonably be called a comedy: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-get-out-golden-globes-comedy
Or look at Sorry to Bother You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
I thought both of these movies were hilarious, and they worked with extremely "challenging" social topics.
As an old, when people start talking about movies were only funny back in the day, I suspect they just imprinted on whatever was funny in their youth. Time moves on, and humor has to move with it.
My 2 cents on the same topic, except to literature and a potential "cure" to the issue. I'm trying to break into being a fiction writer. Once you learn the tools of the trade of storytelling, it doesn't really matter the medium, you know where the story is going. There's an editor that mentioned this in passing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP_SmnCQA_Y It's in the first 5 minutes of the video. But he explains about some little challenge of being able to predict the end of a novel based on a page or two. The editor slam dunked the literary scholars. When you see a story as a bunch of gears, chains and a motor or two (writers and editors) instead of some ethereal wisp of magic beyond mortal understanding (literary twats and "scholars"), there isn't much that surprises you. Sorry, storytelling isn't magic. It's more formula and structure, no matter how much chest beating "analysts" drum up. Like, when everyone was "surprised" by Knives Out's ending, I was more confused since I figured it out after about 15 minutes into the movie. I enjoyed the little thriller part that was thrown in. That was unexpected. Beyond that, it was a paint by numbers story. With a SJW writer/director and the basic setup of the family, you immediately know what's going to happen and how. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Christie, another one of those where every writer figures out who killed the guy once the body was found because it's stupid easy when you know the mechanics. Analysts, "What a surprising twist!" Also, like no "movie reviewing/analysis expert" has picked up that The Tomorrow War is an allegory to climate change (more important the sacrifice theme of a generation for a future generation) in the disguise of an alien/monster flick. Either none of them actually watched the movie, just watched the trailer or I'm some sort of genius. I'm the first to say I'm an idiot by the way.
Anyways! I had a slog of a time with this when I started to realize this with every movie, show and book. "Alright, they got their milestone and in 3, 2, 1, kick in the balls to the protagonist (things get worser-er). And then in 3, 2, 1, Chekhov's [object/wisdom] helps them out of the problem..." Then I went to a friend's grill party during this woe-is-me phase. Basic American outdoor party. Hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, soda, beer, etc. Nothing surprising, yet, still enjoyable. Maybe this is more of a philosophical, Buddhist, enlightenment change in perception or just me over analyzing, but... who the fuck cares? No, seriously, who the fuck cares about things being completely different every single damn time? Sure, I like variety in food. Fish, salads, chilis, soups, pierogi, curries, sushi etc. But when you really think about it, there's a level of expectations even when you eat "variety". A level of, "not surprises" I and like 90+% of people out there demand in food. 10-20% surprise is okay, but I have to be in the mood for something completely different. Yes, that looks different to everyone. Everyone has different expectations. But you still expect certain things because you like it. This weird demand that everything is different, every time, is really weird.
Beating to the punch: No, you are not Andrew Zimmern. There's a 99.9% chance you're in denial that you like eating a small subset of food on a regular basis. Nothing wrong with trying and appreciating new, I do it too. But new happens extremely rarely with 99.9% of the population. You don't eat new anywhere as often as you may imagine. My point is, don't pretend you don't enjoy eating the same foods you've enjoyed hundreds of times before.
The same thing goes in stories. There are elements and methods those elements are brought together that I enjoy, just like food. Once I learned to enjoy the things that I actually enjoy in stories, I think my love of books and movies skyrocketed. Doesn't mean I think other genres/subgenres are bad. I just learned, "That's good, but it's not for me and that's okay". I like scifi settings more than fantasy. I used to think I had to like fantasy. Thus, I always chased the "new" to fantasy or I thought it was "derivative". Honestly, if someone ever says a story is derivative, it's code for, "I don't like this genre, setting or general intent of this story. Thus, I'm going to get on my high horse and speak down to this." There's a reason some people can watch all 20+ seasons of Law and Order, but others can't watch more than 1 episode. Or read all cozy mysteries and love them all while others read one and go, "Yea, you read one, you read them all". Which is true. You read 1, maybe 2 different cozy mysteries... they're all the same. But you can also say the same about scifi, fantasy, political thrillers, horror, etc. If you didn't like what it's generally about to begin with, you're probably not going to like it anyways. Other than breakout pieces, this is the truth to story telling. You gravitate to aspects of a story. Settings, character types, plot types, certain themes, etc. Learn what those are and enjoy those. Nothing wrong with hating "popular" or "classics" because they don't speak to you. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Oh well. Find your own pond and build your own cabin. Then enjoy it.
I've seen some really fun or thought provoking movies recently: Parasite, El Hoyo (The Platform), Quo Vadis, Aida?, 200 Meters, Luzzu, El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century). Just don't watch the mind-numbing crap that hollywood churns out every year. Truth be told, I've enjoyed some excellent american movies as well, like "Knives Out", "Us" or "Get Out".
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
My favorite original movies of 2019: Parasite, 1917, Once upon a time in hollywood, midsommar, uncut gems, ford v. ferrari, the lighthouse, knives out, jojo rabbit, us, a number of shows that have shifted towards a streamed series format vs. traditional film
I think the film industry is alive and well.
I'd also say that dr. sleep only barely qualifies as a sequel if we're in the mood to complain about hollywood cliches.
There’s a HN rule against complaining that HN is becoming like Reddit. This comment is in the same genre - it was better in the good ole days.
Spoiler alert - it wasn’t. You’ve cherry picked 5 movies from each era out of thousands. There’s no reason to choose these movies instead of others. While the biggest blockbusters are more likely to be remakes or sequels, there’s no shortage of interesting movies.
Just from last year, original films that weren’t remakes or sequels and blew my mind - Parasite, Knives Out, Soul, The Father, Hamilton, White Tiger.
Best part is, we’re living in a time when you have practically unlimited entertainment a few clicks away at absurdly low prices. It’s easy to find something that suits your particular niche if you just look. That wasn’t the case in previous eras where studios had to pander to the largest audience possible.
This might not advance the state of the discussion any further, but have you and/or your father had the chance to see the film "Knives Out"? It's a mystery/dark comedy, and explores somewhat-related ideas in a good-natured way.
My taste is less arthousey so I’m not the one to make the list of modern parallels for these movies. But since you asked, here is my personal list after looking at my Letterboxd (in no particular order) Parasite, Little Women, Into the Spiderverse, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, Knives Out, Annihilation, and Get Out. Almost all of those movies involve some type of unconventional approach or risk by the filmmakers. For example even something as basic as the adaption of a century and a half old book is handled in a new and innovative way unlike the countless earlier adaptations. Heck even the freaking Spider-Man movie was playing with the form in ways that no other movie has ever done before. The artistry, the evolution, and everything else is still there if you look for it.
I didn't say "small". Streaming can certainly allow a movie with a $1m-10m budget to turn a profit. I am mostly worried about the mid-budget standalone movies that are targeted at adults. Movies like Arrival or Knives out are recent examples. I'm not sure streaming works to the same extent for a $30m-60m movies like that.
Did anyone else notice ProtonMail being used in the movie "Knives Out" to send the ransom note? Cracked me up..