Hacker Cinema
Transformers
2007 · Film · 144 min
Part of Transformers Collection
Directed by Michael Bay
AdventureScience FictionAction
Young teenager Sam Witwicky becomes involved in the ancient struggle between two extraterrestrial factions of transforming robots – the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons. Sam holds the clue to unimaginable power and the Decepticons will stop at nothing to retrieve it.
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215 comments on Hacker News
I was stuck on a plane years ago and it was the only reason I watched a transformers movie. The back half of the movie had the American villain CEO travel to China, where the pure and correct Chinese CEO discovered the evil corruption of the American CEO, and reluctantly saved the American CEO as he immediately switched from "movie villain" to "cowardly child."
I never did look up if I'd watch an international version, and whether the US release was different, but pandering was quite surprising.
It's not even a throwback. That U2 album still shows up if I accidentally open Apple Music. I haaaaate it. I disliked U2 before any of this, but now I have absolutely sworn to never ever listen to any of their music.
Google did the same thing with Transformers 2 I think. It still shows up as Purchased for me even though I absolutely did not purchase that. Good way to ensure I never ever watch any Transformers movie!
Huh. That actually brings up a kind of modern parallel I hadn't thought of. A lot of action movies are done primarily, or in part, on greenscreen. The intent of using a greenscreen has nothing to do with what was captured, and more so to do with what is trying to be depicted; what ought be seen, not what is being seen by the actors and actresses.
It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?
Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics, because I think that constraints on movie sets either demand innovative solutions, or force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable so I would generally be for practical effects over special effects. In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.
Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.
This is good, I found another one to express what I was feeling.
We are here, We are waiting.
- Optimus prime.
My interpretation is that everyone no matter how bad things look from outside has hope/seeds of hope which are just waiting for the right conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJszUl1EI4A (I also feel like, the ending of this movie/transformers was one of the best movies and the ending still gives me goosebumps in hope for future)
> Coincidently, in the original timeline of Transformer movie, 2029 is the year that the Resistance, led by John Connor, destroyed Skynet and ended the war against the machines.
I’d love to see that crossover Terminator and Transformers movie. Optimus Prime vs T-800 anyone?
> So many things...But anybody at The Juilliard School or Berklee College of Music can tell you if you are good or bad on your musicianship...Anybody at the California School of Cinematic Arts or American Film Institute Conservatory can advise you on your future as a future Director...and anybody at the Pratt Institute can comment on your quality as an Artist.
Can anyone else tell us that, or only certain 'gatekeepers'? Who gets to judge the amount of Quality in a thing, or whether something is Good for its Purpose?
> Why do you dismiss the concept of Quality?
"Quality" as in the amount of 'Goodness' something has?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_(philosophy)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good
An Axe is a bad Chair because it does not have the Qualities for (e.g.) sitting, but that is not its Purpose.
Were the folks that made PHM trying to make Art or Entertainment (or a mix of the two)? If PHM was made to be Entertainment, and people were entertained, was it not Good at its desired Purpose? Did 2007's Transformers have the Quality of Entertainment that it set out to have? Roger Ebert seems to have thought so.
> If there is no objectivity....then you would have no basis to explain why a film is better or worse than another, A student first iPhone short would be equal to The Godfather. A child banging pots would be indistinguishable from a Symphony.
What is the purpose of "art": in general and/or particular works of it? What makes (a work of) 'art' 'good'?
Is PHM 'good' in its purpose? Is The Room? When a child is banging on pots, is he accomplishing his purpose in his 'creative act'?
> I think Michael Bay sometimes sucks (“Pearl Harbor,” “Armageddon,” “Bad Boys II“) but I find it possible to love him for a movie like “Transformers.” It’s goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset.
* https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-2007
Yes, I thought of this too: the industry was full of slop way before AI. We spoke of "Netflix's algorithm", but even before Netflix blockbuster movies were done with a cookie cutter. Transformers (to pick one example) existed way before this brand of AI. Movies like it are perfect candidates to be prompted and built by an AI, since they were almost there anyway.
I can't help but think this "AI empowerment" will make it even easier for studios to produce more garbage at an unprecedented pace. And they won't have to even let actors age gracefully and die; now we can have Tom Cruise (or whomever, pick your poison) forever.
You're right.
And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun).
Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have happened before the first Transformers, but it was in full swing by then.
Were one of a conspiratorial mind, one would guess massive amounts of money were spent in changing this image.
> There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like “Shawshank,” which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.
This resonates with me and is a really concise way to explain why, to me, a 2 to 2.5 hour long Marvel or Transformers movie feels like an eternity, while a movie like Shawshank never has me checking my watch.
That's pretty much what I'm saying.
There's a fun series of YouTube video essays called "The Whole Plate" that discusses film theory and critique through the lens of Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies. Pretty fascinating stuff, ranging from cinematography shop-talk (you can't remember what happened in a Bay movie because there are rules for holding audience attention and he breaks them on purpose to make you feel anxious) to critical lenses and how the same movie tells a different story depending on the preconceptions you bring in.
The author, Lindsay Ellis, uses Bay's work for a couple of reasons: she actually enjoys the films, they're pop-culture relevant so her target audience is likely to be familiar with them, they have been heavily criticized as having little artistic merit... and they grossed like $4 billion worldwide, so at some point the conversation of what art is becomes irrelevant if the guy doing it bought a mansion off the work.
(As you noted, any debate over the artistic merit of MLP and Discworld will reveal far more about the biases of the debaters than the works themselves, so what would be the point?)
Probably inspired by the first Michael Bay Transformers movie.
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
Michael Bay are basically not worth watching for me. Things move around the screen too fast to know what's going on. The Transformers movies are especially bad due to it because it can be hard to tell which robots are on which side; and , if you're bouncing all over the screen so you never get a chance to focus on one, it becomes impossible.
>i remember in 2007 i noticed that movies sucked… i was a teenager. and i was right
You had an opinion, it was neiter right nor wrong. I was a teenager and watched Juno, 300, Bay's Transformers, And Pirates of the Carribean 3. I thought it was a renaissance. It's all based on personal experience.
> things are not the same regardless of how much you want to believe that
So how is this related to a union in 2025?
>Consumption without reflection or doing is mostly entertainment, like you would do with a novel or a movie.
Maybe you do do this and were making a sweeping claim-understandble. But if not, try inspecting the themes and topics brought up by the novels you read and movies you watch?
Almost all media has something of value to dissect and discuss if you are willing to do so.
Your last sentence reminds me of when I shat on the first Transformers movies as a teenager thinking they were nothing more than trite Hollywood cash grabs but, my professor nudged me to think about the movie again beyond my assumptions and ego.
Feels slightly different in that the Matrix is original so literally nobody in the GPs audience knew what to expect whereas Transformers has been a thing (comics, toys, hundreds of TV episodes) since the mid 1980s. I also feel like the early 2000s had a lot of good CGI movies (LOTR, King Kong, etc) so that to me doesn't explain it either
I immediately loathed the first Transformers film because of all the wasted talent for a movie with such poor writing and pacing.
There exists art where the human connection and effort is the point, and this is not because you want to show off how rich you are ("owning" this kind of art is not what most of us are after).
However, Transformers movies and equivalent "art as a product" will be made by algorithm or GenAI, if they aren't already.
1. Recapitulation of our childhood is particularly strong in my generation. For example, even after the Transformers movies, we obviously thought it wasn't enough like our memories, so we made Bumblebee.
2. Software for some 80s systems is ubiquitous.
3. Sound blaster hell/IRQ hell is a real thing and DOS is frustrating more than fun.
4. Prior generation computers were made for work and fun was a rare side effect of letting off steam.
5. Since Windows 2000 modern computers run the same software, so your retro is limited to beige boxes with flaky capacitors.
6. Non-wintel 90s+ computers are interesting and are indeed becoming a focus of retro computing. Power PC Macintosh, Acorn, BeBoxes, NeXT, SGI, even HP and DEC RISC computers are finding enthusiasm.
YouTube caters to every niche. Including the more snobbish demographic who “claims” they don’t understand the appeal of YouTube videos (aka don’t understand humans and entertainment in general)
Check out stuff by Johnny Harris , veritasium, etc… for more educational stuff.
Also I didn’t like the ageism comment. I’m about your age and I can definitely understand the appeal of Mr. Beast. I feel a lot of the disdain for him is more snobbery than anything. Some people think they’re better or too good for that type of entertainment. If you truly don’t understand the appeal I think that’s actually a sign of autism. It’s unlikely you’re autistic and it’s more likely to be snobbery disguised as lack of understanding.
Entertainment is usually mindless anyway. It’s not like Shakespeare is some higher form of entertainment. It’s all snobbery that segregates these things. Transformers has more technical complexity and represents a bigger human achievement then Shakespeare.
The technical know how of thousands of people utilizing technology decades in development combined together to achieve the transformers movie to tell a story with more clarity then the equally cliche story of Romeo and Juliet.
It’s all mindless entertainment and class based prejudice.
The amber/teal stuff is mostly because it makes the foreground warmer and the backgrounds colder drawing the audience's focus. Or so the theory goes. I think it's just more of a case of "fuck it, no one is going to complain if we do this"
Check out the transformers films - those are the canonical punch in the face in that department.
The Fugitive was a good movie but I think the Transformers and Fast and Furious series are trash. I really liked Wolf Warrior 2 on the other hand and I'd add that that movies is not about nurturing resentments or seeking conflict with the west in the slightest unlike some Chinese movements that have come out since them. I only wish Ne Zha had not been packed with fart jokes but that's what you get when you are cribbing from Dreamworks movies.
Bad news, my friend: you're a Jeep cyborg. Basically something from a Transformers movie.
And yeah, I'm stretching the argument a bit -- of course at least on a conscious level there's a boundary at my fingertips where I know that my body ends by the more generally accepted definition of "me".
This comes after this year selling the rights to the Transformers movie series, an arguably larger hit to their ability to have mainstream impact. It seems very unlikely they wouldn't be looking for a buyer for WotC as well, and trimming down to just the IP may be making it a better sale.
The company is struggling and likely pulling out all the stops the avoid bankruptcy, when you need liquidity this could very much include cuts to otherwise profitable segments.
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Not OP, but everyone is entitled to an opinion. I can not like Transformers without having a ten-point plan for how to make it a passable movie^.
^ While writing this, I came up with loads of concrete suggestions relating to Transformers, but kind of beside the point.*
This thread is about Google or Netflix blocking in-video/in-movie ads. It's a freedom to experience a creative expression in the way its creator made it. Should Netflix just never air Barbie or Transformers or LEGO movie because they are basically just one big ad? Should Google or Netflix even be in the business of deciding which part of a movie or an uploaded video is an ad or a sponsorship or monetize-able? matheusmoreira is suggesting they check with him first and he can decide which part should be blocked and which is ok.
What if you have a product placement for jack daniels because the character in your movie is the type of character that will chug jack. Should it be up to Netflix to decide "umm, no, this character now drinks Mack Lanyals" who cares what the film maker made?
When will we find out that Star Trek, Transformers, and other shows are loosely directed by the government?
Somewhat kidding but also wouldn’t be surprised!
And not about "alien robots who can disguise themselves by transforming into everyday machinery, primarily vehicles" [1] either. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_(film)
I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off.
Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
> It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.
Some even manage to enjoy it. I did not believe anyone actually wanted, let alone enjoyed the misery of modernity until I experienced one such person firsthand. It blowed my mind, I was in shock for a straight day. The guy genuinely "liked" the new Transformers movie (which was beyond awful), "enjoyed" fast food, and "liked" the big car-honk-filled city center and CO2-infested loud mall. When I think of words 'deranged' and 'insane', no criminal but this guy appears in my mind's eye.
Years ago I went with a friend to see Transformers. He is an absolute massive Transformers fan, so he insisted that we arrive no later than an hour before the movie would start. Me and my girlfriend meet up with him and a few other 90 minutes before, got our tickets, went for dinner and arrived about when the commercials ended and the trailers started. My friend was completely out of it, in his mind we missed part of the experience. I think he's the kind of customers the movies want.
For me, I just get my ticket in advance and show up about 20 minutes late, seems to work out fine.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but it is a movie based on a doll (almost like the ultimate commercial). It’s been done before (transformers) but it feels a little wierd this time.
I was listening to The Big Picture podcast, of which the podcasters watch way more movies in the theatre than I ever could. They seem like raging extroverts, but I guess a lot of podcasters are. One of them poked fun at men watching a movie alone in the afternoon not being dating material. The host (mostly?) was joking as he was watching the latest Transformers movie alone. It’s not just feeling alone in a crowd in that situation—-people fear being judged as well, like being forever stamped with “not dating material” on your forehead regardless of it being true or not. It kind of bothered me that he focused on that as it just adds to the social stigma.
> But that was “The Exorcist.” A film. (Maybe?) An old movie, at least. The “Transformers” franchise, which has grossed more than $5 billion across six films, was more like … I.P. (Michael Bay, the “Transformers” producer, declined to comment on Dr. Howard’s decorating choices or the neighbors’ reaction.)
I imagine at USD 25k a pop, he has the whole IP thing squared away.
Thank you! This has been bugging me and the references I found online to Newton Howard all seem to refer to the blue robot as "Optimus Prime". I know Howard is not necessarily a fan of the toys/shows/movies. But c'mon, if you're gonna troll the neighborhood, at least know the names of the robots you're using. Also, Optimus is the most well-known of all the Transformers. How could he (and the news media) get this so wrong?
I'm not even sure what you are actually trying to say at this point.
At first you seemed to be insinuating that AI will "upend vfx" because a lot fof movies are "like transformers" and now you're saying "never is a long time and what if AI becomes like a human"
The links between the CIA/DoD and Hollywood are well documented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion#Work_with_entertainment
They help with movies like Iron Man and Transformers by lending equipment and so forth. It isn't a bad thing.
Sadly, Hollywood is in decline and is more likely to show the US in a bad light than good at the moment.
nah, you can't tell me that the transformers movies have plot and they raked in the money!
The one who's responsible for this, should be made gone without a golden parachute.
I don't play d&d, whether I ever have played. But I know, if you have a community - NEVER EVER do something, that will split or outrage the comm members. You will lose.
If you lose a few core members, you lose engagement and word spreaders. This will put a crack into the community and this crack will grow bigger.
With d&d become more mainstream - there is a movie now? Paramount+ plans a series.. what about Amazon and the men of steel? They, too, announced something with d&d.. More and more mainstream will enter. The creators will feel betrayed because of that and may be stop playing at all. The point being a creator for a game is, among lots of others, having a certain social position. The ones playing the stuff created by you, will appreciate and look up and give back a feeling being important and having higher admire and like this.
With more and more commercializing, it will be destroyed. Take transformers as example. The first series "YEAH!"... The plastic stuff you can buy.. "yeah".. then the revival with the transformers movies started good, but lose more and more traction. 2023 there will be a new transformers movie out to the cinemas.. now with transforming beasts.. they killed the franchise with "to much".
D&D is the new hobbits dream that is simulated within the matrix on the 13th floor by the emptiness.
Interesting, I didn't love the new Avatar but I thought it was much better paced and directed than a Marvel or superhero movie. Shots lingered and showed more emotion than the current crop of action / fantasy movies (Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers).
> That said, rewatched transformers too, purely for the joy of the initial transformation
Aside from the voice acting, there's nothing redeeming about those movies and felt like someone just pissed on my childhood. Any aspect of the cartoons or toys that inspired joy and wonder was lost in translation.
The initial transformations were spoiled by trailers and also just disappointing in general. The transformations are largely incomprehensible and they might as well have used Star Trek transporter FX or a flash of light to transform them.
Given advances in technology, I'm not so sure it has to be a blockbuster for there to be a comparison. Especially given how formulaic blockbusters can be. (Eg there are 6 Transformers movies, with 2 more in development.) Drive (2011) is an indie movie, costing an estimated $20 million (inflation adjusted) compared to almost $220 for Terminator 2. Everything Everywhere All At Once cost $25 million to make, just over the threshold of "indie".
Comparing computing power is a bit handwavey, but former Pixar employee Chris Good estimated that the SPARCstation 20 render farm cluster that rendered Toy Story had only half the power of the 2014 Apple iPhone 6. https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-Toy-Story-in-2011-compared-to-how-long-it-took-in-1995
Is the "Transformers" movie designed to deliberately mislead you about the existence of alien robots?
I agree with your last sentence, but on the subject of positive portrayals of US armed forces, the studios actually have an incentive to play nice. The DoD will let film productions use real equipment and personal, but only after vetting the script and making changes as they see fit.
For example, the Transformers movies: https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/
The general concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex
Yeah I feel like the fact that there are N screens all over the place is a huge distraction (even when I'm trying to relax!)
Just having somebody watching transformers in the corner of my eye... on a flight a couple of years ago I watched 2 bollywood movies start to finish cuz the lady in the row in front of me was watching it and I couldn't help just watching on her screen.
I am definitely not saying that and I wasn't aware this is what the director said. Thanks for the correction.
Even with that however, I think we can all agree that art interpretation is a personal experience and nobody else can impose their interpretation on us. F.ex. Michael Bay claimed that his Transformers movies are an emotional journey while an overwhelming amount of movie-goers said they went there for the robots and explosions.
I respect the director's idea but it's absolutely not how I experienced the movie.
Hollywood is churning out Transformers, Marvel, and Fast & Furious movies by the dozen. I don’t think this really appeals to most people over a certain age.
Scorsese eh? What does he know about cinema, right? Okay, enough sarcasm. I think a lot of people share his opinion but they won't publicly criticize the enormous money printing studios that eventually give them jobs. Disney is a beast of many tentacles and if you speak out against one aspect you might find yourself turned down in other departments which might actually matter to you.
I think though that it's a huge compromise and sometimes as far as giving up your artistic integrity when you make a superhero blockbuster. You're making entertainment for kids, you're being pinned by focus groups, ad men and franchising demands, not to mention the strict age requirements, and as of late, olbigatory cultural stances. How can you even make a movie like that?
Don't even get me started on the ensemble movies. Those are atrocious. Good luck jamming 40 lead heroes in your movie and having anything substantial happen to their characters. Not that having them together makes any sense. Even if you own both Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, thay don't mix! They have a completely different vibe!
It would be a fun experiment to create a Marvel Movie Script Generator and see if you can get something resembling (or even better?) than their usual shtick.
Of course, money is to blame. When your movie is a corporate product designed to earn for shareholders, you get pictures like MCU and the Transformers movies. These movies are doing their job. Too bad for us for being interested in an engaging, original experience. Thank goodness off beat studios exist that produce some actually interesting movies.
I had no idea. That makes it seem like an even bigger omission.
Transformers was really big and the Michael Bay reboot movies made the franchise huge again and it’s all basically Anime.
This line makes me recall Roger Ebert talking about the transformers, which seems to me to epitomize american cgi-heavy movie producing:
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/the-fall-of-the-revengers
"The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots® and Decepticons® must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like."
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
Transformers movies took that to a very extreme, where every fight scene is just a constant motion blur (zoomed).
Red Dawn and Top Gun.
I guess some people don't realize that stuff like the Transformers movies were all done with help from the US Military as well.
Probably the same people who don't make the connection with the military displays associated with sporting events (and the national anthem and its military theme before domestic sporting events). Stuff like the Blue Angles. It is all very Roman Empire the way we display our weapons of war, but lots of people can't even see it.
And whichever organization selects which films get to be shown in China. Some films do much, much better in China than in the US thanks to this; some examples are the Transformers films, the Warhammer film, and someone else already mentioned Pacific Rim and Iron Man.
Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China.
Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without.
Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light"
I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.
I say "bad" in the sense that Transformers is bad.
In the sense that an F-22 is used for CAS / bombing in The Tomorrow War (which I'd assume was one of Amazon's better funded efforts).
A lot of them just feel like "Oh, you just gave some money to people, removed the usual checks and balances that exist in filming, and told them to deliver a movie ASAP."
It'd be one thing if they were making niche or more interesting content, but it feels like they're mostly just making more action movies and baking shows... faster and at lower quality.
The blurry mess of fast CGI is NOT down to the 24fps problem. As the action is so fast, it's faster to render complex scenes in lower detail CGI as the eye (mostly) can't see it.
However if you pause the action, you can clearly see where the rendering shortcuts have been made (The Transformers movies are a good example of this).
I've been a CGI head for a while, and IMO, Iron Man was the first movie to be reaching organic/transparent realistic fantasy level of details (geometric, texture, animation). It had weight and yet the superpower quality to moves and actions that people drew in comics or animations before.
Prior this, Transformers had a shot but it was overblown and used for extreme wow (apt for a monster-blockbuster movie).
Compare this to Star Wars prequels, which were a massive leap in tech (full blown CGI everything, planets, nature, armies) but was clearly still just a tad too cartoonish.
It's interesting to even fathom that someone would put cultural domain issues entirely within a capitalist context.
There are two fundamental reasons that content everywhere is subsidized and protected. They are of course related.
First, more obviously is the cultural aspect. The things we believe, the stories we tell, are part of our identities. With critical mass and investment those stories some will take root.
It's a little bit of a myth to suggest that a small creative team just 'makes something' and it goes big. This does happen, but generally speaking, it takes a machine. Many layers. 'Taylor Swift' should be thought of as a 'Brand and Production Company' - as opposed to a person.
You'll find that almost all truly creative endeavours are at least partly communitarian. The ballet exists only because Louis XIV, the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere, personally created it.
Almost all such endeavours have a purely creative component, it's actually more rare than not that those works are purely commercial. The creative world is in constant tension between 'art and money'. You often hear famous movie stars say 'One for Me, One for the Studio' hinting at that.
Some cultures are stronger than others (aka European), and some have more of a critical mass in terms of audience (aka Indonesia), some have both (aka Japan). Some have contiguous histories of relative sovereignty (aka Thailand), some the opposite (aka Laos, Tibet) and so varying levels of support and protection are needed otherwise a lot of it would just evaporate.
Most countries provide fairly significant tax advantages etc. for creative works.
Second, is the fact that creative works on the commercial side, like anything, are an industry with similar kinds of underlying components and critical masses.
In that context it's a little bit glib to say to a group of people in a little region for example to 'compete' with a massive established industrial base. Whatever the industry.
Hollywood is big enough, has several very institutionalized layers of production, incredible degree of hyper-specialization (i.e. you will find more 'kinds of trades' and people who are really good at it there, than anywhere in that field). That includes access to capital, legal frameworks, specialized talent, workers guild specialization, harmonization with government (i.e. getting locations), talent agencies, distribution channels and relationships with Netflix etc..
This extends to the rest of the 'support' aspects of the industry like bookings on talk shows, morning shows, cover placements in magazines, media dockets etc.. It's all professionalized and mostly corporate.
Marvel films, in particular are a really good example of this - they are not particularly good films, but the production quality of them is basically '1st rate' at every turn, from writing, production design, direction, story narrative, the immense production support, post-production / effects, marketing.
Once you add in language and cultural barriers, i.e. the fact that a movie about 'Captain America' will have a strong enough audience domestically, with some acceptance abroad, and you have insurmountable competitive advantage. (Nobody is going to watch a film about 'Captain France', or 'Captain Japan' - or rather, many fewer).
The only other place that can compete really is the UK, which has many of those same foundational advantages, plus a long history of 'popular theatre' and especially the BBC which exists in part as a systematic support / lynch-pin under the auspices relevant to Point #1.
Canada, pound for pound, actually punches above it's weight relative to the US in a lot of production aspects. The new Dune film is Denis Villneuve, and his 'posse' of creatives are from Montreal. In some ways, it's a 'Canadian-led' film, but that just happens to be talent, it's not really part of the industrial base. Villneuve exists because Quebec strongly supports creative endeavours (and FYI for every Villneuve, there are 10 you've not heard of, 50 who never really had support or a shot, and 1000 who tried and failed).
FYI there is actually a lot of film production in Toronto/Van/Montreal, but mostly the 'labour' bits of production, not the choice roles.
The raw economics of entertainment, in the short run, optimize like anything else. Take a 'Large Open Economy' and put it next to 'Small Open Economies' and you'll see consolidation hugely disproportionately in the 'Large' economy, which is where all the talent, surplus, and good jobs end up.
Entertainment happens to be at least one sector, where due to 'Point #1' (i.e. culture), there's wide recognition of the need to support it via non-market forces, so at least there's that. But really the same applies to any sector.
If we really think that we should just all enjoy Marvel and Netflix - and that's that - well then all of that is fine - but it's such a hugely narrow aspect of creative output.
Finally, the true globalization of the industry has seen the biggest budgets move towards ever dumber films. Fast and Furious, Transformers ... they have to appeal not not just to 'working class Americans', but to 'the global working class' which is barely literate, and of course they're from diverse cultures so there's a lot less to draw upon for cultural reference. 'Transformers' , 'Godzilla' etc. are basically giant action sequences and that's it. Of course that's totally fine - but they suck up the budget and attention of other potential works, which don't get made. So ironically, this problem has manifested itself even for the 'Large Open Economy'.
For your reference, here are quotes from a few dozen industry luminaries on that subject [1]. It's a good read.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/20/movies/movie-industry-future.html
I suppose I'd agree with that, but then we have to start talking about what we mean by "bad" -- bad for whom; bad to do what with?
I once watched the action movie Pacific Rim with a friend who told me she didn't like it because it didn't have enough story and character development. She's right that it doesn't have much of that, but it also was never trying to. It may not have been the movie for her, but that isn't the same as being a bad - poorly executed - movie. Transformers, on the other hand, is bad at achieving even what it sets out to achieve. Much easier to call that bad, in my view.
I really hated the Michael Bay Transformer films. Have you seen Transformers War for Cybertron on Netflix? It’s nothing amazing, but more entertaining than the Bay films.
As a dev in a business environment, I don't care about your project. At all. It's going to be run-of-the-mill business app, storage, front-end, logic. There will be nothing exciting or interesting for me whatsoever. I don't care about your case management, insurance leads, or Teams Governance. Becuase I'm a human with human interests (writing code, and dreaming of a decent Transformers movie before I die), your projects are not interesting, and they will not invest me.
However for every project I take on, there will always be something I have never done before, or a maybe some new technique I want to try, could be a new language. That's where the engagement comes from.
I don't care about the project, I care about writing code (and exploring writing code) to the best of my ability (and to the best of the project constraints).
If I've done my job well, that means I learned something new/had fun and the project will never burn my screen pixels ever again.
I used to think that movie reviewers were out of touch with the common man. The fact that they would give movies like Transformers a low score but rave about obscure boring movies would always annoy me.
But several years ago I worked on a side project where I reviewed a movie every week for two years, and when it was over I became much more sympathetic towards movie critics.
I agree with this blog post when he says that movies are repetitive. The same gimmicks and tropes are used over and over. It really does become boring and annoying to see different shades of the same thing again and again.
This is why critics rave about the obscure weird movies that you never heard of. They have to sit through thousands of hours of generic crap and anything that is different is like a breath of fresh air to them.
Something really exasperates this problem of generic movie making that wasn’t touched on in the article is the soulless Hollywood factory system that is currently cranking out worthless junk that was designed by committee.
Look no further than the recent Star Wars trilogy for evidence of this.
Very rarely to we see movies that a result of a singular vision, directors are now just replaceable cogs that have to bend completely to the will of the studio or they will be replaced during production (like the Han Solo movie) Ok
Hmmm.... I guess it is when you grew up? I thought the 70's were king for U.S. filmmakers. And 70's sci-fi was some of the best. Until "Star Wars" came along and killed it.
I loved "Star Wars" when it came out, was blown away. But in hindsight I am sad to see it was marked the end of 70's sci-fi.
And then "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I loved, was more or less the modern blueprint for all the crap that has come out since. It represents a storyboard approach to the screenplay/film: basically action sequences tied together with a thin thread of plot.
The various "Pirates of the Caribbean" are classic examples of the rot that followed as are every superhero film, every "Fast and Furious" film, "Transformers", etc.
I don't have the cycles to spend on all the "streamed content" that HBO, Netflix, etc. are cranking out now so I can't comment on whether "TV" is better these days.
not sure this is correct. We may need to get actual numbers or divide up 'film / media' into different segments..
I recall seeing news about big movies, eg transformers and others where in order to satisfy the global market, ie China, decisions needed to be made.. and given that many of those markets appear to be more racist/anti-muslim, (obv not 100, but majority I believe)
and your comment seems to be suggesting [hope] that things above "will get better as the global market continues to expand." -
I'm not chiming in to say this or that is a good or bad thing, just trying to clarify that some things may make one think catering to broader global markets may not make "western whiter countries" more anti-racist or whatever is being suggested as 'changing and will get better' - if that is the perspective being considered for 'get better'.
There are studies showing "diversity" on movie posters hurt sales abroad - and of course there has been local pushback for whitewashing things for increased sales -
Unless we are talking about gov funded wokeness spreading where making money is not a goal. But I did not get that impression from the thread here.
The last Transformers movie was literally targeted at audiences in China. So maybe it's just market forces...
If you indicated that you want to see more minorities cast - then you have the option of going to see Moonlight, over La-la-land.
I don't think this is anywhere near as obvious as you make out. Film is an odd example, given that the films that lay claim to being great works of art (e.g, Koyaanisqatsi, Wild Strawberries, The Battle of Algiers) are rarely the most popular and highest-grossing films (e.g., Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story). We usually mean something by 'greatness' quite different from 'popular'.
Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it:
1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss.
2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work.
3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich.
4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.
Just like with any other media, popular and good aren't always the same, despite there being a fairly close relationship between the two.
The reason for why critical acclaim is a better measure of whether a book is good than popularity is because critical acclaim is explicitly and directly concerned with assessing the quality of the product. As opposed to popularity, which has zero explicit relationship to the quality, it is only concerned with the raw demand numbers.
Just because mcdonalds is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) restaurants in the world, it doesn't mean that the quality of food there is better than that at a random much less popular Michelin star restaurant.
In the same vein, Transformer movie series is of a pretty terrible quality, but it is insanely more popular than something very critically acclaimed like Parasite. Just looked up numbers, and the first Transformers movie alone (from 2007) had about $700mil in worldwide sales, as opposed to about $250mil for Parasite. And mind you, Parasite wasn't some unknown indie movie that was critically acclaimed. It was one of the most popular critically acclaimed movies out there.
I agree with you that this article is a tiresome attempt to spot-weld an archaeological subject interesting in itself to the gender-and-power fad. However, with regard to this:
> If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them
many toys sold in North America over the last several decades have been closely tied to media franchises, and there has been plenty of criticism of those media franchises for accepting strings-attached help from the US military to bolster its image, e.g. the Transformers movies [0].
[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/
I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow?
You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this.
So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc.
From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits.
I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".
You might be right. I was just trying to offer a data point and offering a speculative extrapolation.
If I've decided to "make a night of" a movie, the ticket price is almost irrelevant. I guess I'm applying a very narrow stereotype but most of the "serious movie lovers" I know are fairly well paid. I'll pay for quality. Transformers - I wouldn't go even if it was free.
I just feel like there's something being squeezed out of the equation here.
I have been reading this same article for the past thirty years. Yet, I can still install and run whatever operating system and software I want on my laptop _and_ desktop, and I don't see any sign that that freedom will go away anytime soon.
It is true that the billion-dollar media companies have decided a subscription model is more lucrative than a one-time-purchase model for the mass-market content they produce (movies, TV shows, music, etc.).
But also unlike the author, I don't think my ability to consume mass-market media on my own terms is a moral imperative or has much bearing on my overall freedom. If Warner Brothers doesn't want to sell me a copy of Transformers 43 that I can play with VLC, I don't see that as much of a threat to anything I care about.
I think this was one of the first red flags. It reminds me of ripoff movies that have names similar to popular movies to sleaze some of that popularity for themselves. Like Transformers / Transmorphers.
I'm more cynical and believe that the amount of risk involved means a serious degree of risk aversion towards 'proven models' - which means boring or at best 'fun and chipper' but not 'great cinema' - like Avengers.
The 'lowest common denominator' on planet earth is actually significantly lower than merely just a US audience.
Stories have to be simple and stupid (think Transformers) in order to make a run in theaters.
They have to work across cultures.
Something like 'The Joker' can work - but that was relatively low budget - and still risky.
Avengers are basically the perfect format for today because they are fun characters, a big fanbase, and with some 'smart writing' all they need then is 'good production'. That's it. It doesn't have to be great.
Star Wars and Star Trek should fit this model but they screwed it up.
Dune and many other stories are just 'out of bounds' given the risk involved.
A lot of actors are lamenting this, and it's why we are only seeing 'remakes'. Comedies, RomComs - dying.
I think the only hope is Netflix, Disney+ etc..
Unless the theatre model changes.
Sometimes this type of long form journalism is nice because it lets you marinate in a different world. Here I can't help but feel like I just want them to get to the point because I don't really want to marinate in the Flat Earth world.
If a super intelligent AI came to me and said, "I'm going to take over the world and destroy humanity, but first I wanted to see if there was anything you needed." One of the things that I would ask it to do in order to buy time would be to annotate all the background details of every movie. For example, in Jurassic Park when Hammond is trying to get Dr. Grant to come to the park, the trailer they are in has a bunch of newspapers on the walls. What do those say? Who are all the extras that are hanging out at the dig site? Like who are the actors and can we give their characters any backstories that are consistent with the world of Jurassic Park.
I can't help but want the same thing from a story about a Flat Earth conference. How many other people went there just to see what was up. Who is there as a joke. Occasionally people send fake articles to journals to see if they can get them published. Does the same thing happen to Flat Earth conferences? People try to see how much of an outlandish presentation they can get away with? And finally, how many people go there, have a good time, pretend to buy into the whole Flat Earth business, but then when they get back and are cornered indicate that they only went because their friend went / to see what it was like / because they make fun of them later / etc.
Finally, this whole business feels very similar to me as the whole Evolution in education stuff. Sure people believe in the wrong thing, but at the end of the day very few people actually understand how the right thing works and even if they get that far they don't see what any of the implications are. Yeah, I would prefer people believe things that are true, but they don't understand it either way and they refuse to think about the implications.
I greatly appreciate the world building in things like Lord of the Rings or Avatar the last airbender. Everything works together in great detail to create a holistic world where actions have consequences that echo through the centuries. It feels like most people are just as happy to watch Michael Bay's Transformers. Maybe they like Avatar as well, but they don't understand why the shyamalan movie "adaptation" is bad. So I have a hard time caring that they agree with me that the cartoon was good as well.
Interestingly a lot of films (like Transformers and Fast and Furious franchises) cost a lot, yet are incredibly boring. Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner had much smaller budget. And Youtube rocks on modest earnings.
It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are).
I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
I'm probably the opposite but it's not really surprising that there's a divergence between the two. The box office makes it pretty clear that big budget popcorn movies/summer blockbusters/etc. are very popular with mainstream audiences. Whereas people who feel a calling to be film critics (or any sort of culture) tend to be a bit dismissive of at least cookie-cutter flavors of blockbusters (e.g. Transformers, most modern superhero movies, etc.) and more appreciative of indie and other smaller releases even if they aren't full-on fans of European and Asian art house fare.
Even Ebert, who was a relatively "everyman" sort of critic, definitely had a serious film critic persona if you've ever listened to any of his DVD commentaries.
> instead of getting rid of it
Like we can get rid of Coronavirus? Escaping to space for them is a form of quarantine, or a "green zone" to escape from the "red zone" of Earth. There's no hope of disinfecting a planet.
> Somehow they also know how to get rid of the blight at least in specimens,
It's easy to disinfect small things, like a handful of seeds.
> you wonder why instead of launching giant capsules in space full of plants without the blight, they wouldn't just build giant airtight greenhouses on earth?
The implication is that they're already doing everything they can, but that the Blight will eventually leave Earth about as habitable as Mars, so at that point you may as well go somewhere else.
> They plan and build an interstellar mission all by themselves
It's mentioned several times that the staff of hundreds are NASA (logos everywhere), and that the spaceships are largely the same that Coop used to fly before the Blight. That's why they want him specifically, he's a trained pilot with previous experience.
There's also a lot of technology left, such as AIs with apparent sentience. These are common enough to be used to pilot harvesters!
> hasn't trained for at least ten years
They skipped over the simulator time, it's a movie, not a documentary. What would you rather have as a pilot: Someone who's never flown before or someone who has?
> They could just throw some in space: no suit or capsule needed- do your job and report.
The AIs may not be as good as humans.
> the rocket launches from inside the nasa office building.
It was explained that this is a launch silo, the same as the type used by ballistic missiles. This is standard stuff.
The reasoning is that they're working largely in secret, because their work is unpopular with the public.
PS: The American public being this rabidly anti-scientific is entirely plausible! cough5G conspiracy nutscough.
> Random adventures with CGI on alien planets and very human squabbles follow
They're mankind's only hope and under incredible stress. Their friend dies. They're not exactly going to go about their business like emotionless robots.
Also, drama is entertaining. This is a movie!
Adventures are also entertaining. What's wrong with adventure!?
> Then there's black hole
Which was awesome to see in a Hollywood movie.
> love silliness.
Probably the most out-there part of the movie, but so what? If they didn't put this in there, like you said, they could have just sent robots.
Look at it like this: Have you ever heard stories of lost dogs that travel a thousand miles to get back to their home? Because they love their owners and are desperate to get back, no matter the hardship? Coop is like that dog, his love for his daughter is the thing that helps him find the way home. It's sappy, but whatever.
> the hero rejoins the cute lady in dire need of company- she surely won't reject his love.
Agreed, the mandatory relationship is a trope too many.
So clearly it's a crap movie that nobody should watch.
We should stick to the sci-fi classics like Transformers.
> I believe inside the special operations community, Navy Seals, especially Team 6, gets a lot of flak for the amount of insider content that comes out
This may be true, but it also reminds me of the long and lucrative relationship between the US military and Hollywood[0]. It's pretty well established at this point that the military is willing to pay for opportunities to look good in movies, like they did in the Transformers series. There's an incredible amount of money behind the scenes influencing military presence in our media, and a lot of people don't realize it.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex
What if the transformers movie was also spying to make money and was the primary cause of remote exploits, crashes, and fraud? Because javascript is.
> I understand your point of view but maybe you should try to understand where others are coming from.
Can you make an argument for it? It kind of feels like a movie critic trying to explain why the Transformers are bad, even though they still rake in billions. If the Transformers changed to make the critic happy, it at best would have no impact on the billions, in all likelihood it would cause a regression, and so the critic needs an incredibly compelling argument.
Meh. For the last 10 years maybe two movies a year get me to a theater, otherwise, television, laptop or phone for me. The only movie in my life where the theater factors into my subjective memory of a movie was The Dark Knight. I'll never forget how immersive the open scene was on a giant IMAX screen.
My memories of sounds in movies on the other hand are only of the bad, like some of the ridiculous sound effects in Transformers with overly accentuated bass
Apple can't stop you from using their products in a movie. Trademarks only protect brand confusion, nobody is going to watch Transformers 17: Age of Voltron and think that the whole movie is an apple product because a robot turns into a iPad.
It's just a case of "if you don't use our product this way, we won't do cross promotions or pay for product placement with you anymore"
> Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?
The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even. A large part of their popular success is that they keep their pacing up even at the expense of things that the critical establishment might consider more important.
> A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated.
No, they didn't. That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo. That was my whole point.
So, your theory is that fans aren't the ones who uncritically support overlong works? Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?
Wait, no, those franchises got horrible reviews and they were made because fans kept turning out to buy tickets for each iteration. Exactly the opposite of what you seem to believe.
It's not a critique of the Hugos, they aren't pretending to be anything else except a popularity contest. A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated. They liked it. That's fans for you.
Eh, not so sure. Black Panther is the most critically acclaimed of the bunch and I haven't seen many people describing the movie using this angle. Sure, it's something that's there, but it's not the meat and the purpose of the movie. Certainly not how Black Panther is describe on its marketing material.
Just check say its IMDB or iTunes or Google Play or the back of the DVD is all about "a powerful enemy reappears putting the world at risk". Even the foe himself states its reason as a revenge for how blacks are/were treated around the world and he needs Wakanda's tech and weapon.
Hey, don't get me wrong. Black Panther is a good movie, and an actual good story. But check some of Scorcese's movies description or blurbs or reviews, or trailers. I think Black Panther's story is secondary to the spectacle. And that's fine! It doesn't go as far as Transformers into the abyss :)
Of course. Why should that be a problem? I often want to relax with a movie where I don't have to think. Transformers don't have to much of a story getting in the way of the action, so is excellent for relaxing viewing at the end of the week. If you check which movies are most watched you might even see that you are in the minority.
I find books to be a much better medium if I want the good story
Independence Day was during the “golden era” of modern film. They’re was a huge range of indie to blockbusters you could see. Transformers (2007) was with the beginnings of the MCU and started this issue. The other side is also Disney leveraging their power over theaters with releases, but sure...
oddly enough, the first transformers movie was one of two films i've fallen asleep to in the theater
He's kinda late to the party decrying these sort of flicks now. You could make the same criticism movies that came out a decade ago, like Armageddon, Independence Day, Transformers, etc.
>Before this episode I always wondered why they kept making those bad transformers movies, turns out China loves em.
...Which is hilarious, because they are heavily subsidized by the US military for advertising reasons.
Before this episode I always wondered why they kept making those bad transformers movies, turns out China loves em.
I think its fine if people want to make movies for the China market, but what I find alarming is copycat behavior trying to bring that sort of censorship here.
It doesn't make any sense to me why anyone should apologize or censor themselves creatively just because someone got salty about it. I find the notion limiting someones creative expression to someone else's judgement of "appropriate" to be despicably egregious.
Sure you can vote with your dollar and time by not watching something you don't like, but its the creators prerogative what to create and what not to create.
Anyone arguing the contrary on the effects of censorship has not looked into the origin of the word.
Longer form than EFaP, but Lindsay Ellis has some great film/TV analysis videos. She's usually more focused on writing than anything else, though. Here's a postmortem she did on the Hobbit films, which was recently nominated for a Hugo award:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs
Other solid works by her include a postmortem on the last season of Game of Thrones and an analysis of themes in Michael Bay's Transformers. (I know that last one sounds weird, but it's really well done.)
It makes perfect sense! That's why Transformers is a better movie than the Godfather...
They've been doing AI training for a century? Wow, this goes deeper than I thought.
Oh, oh no, wait. This the plot to Bay's first Transformers movie.
Fans have already taken to creating unofficial "remasters" if the original is in shoddy quality.
See for example the highest quality available version of Stan Bush - The Touch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZKpByV5764
Versus the "HD Restoration" using footage from the Blu-Ray rip of the Transformers Movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A52--FKUQgU
Unfortunately, you lose the actual performer in the restoration.
> I wonder what a script for an action movie would look like if it was just based off of statistics of all the previous action movies...
Have you seen the Transformers movies?
> ...Probably watchable.
See above.
I would particularly recommend Lindsay Ellis' series "The Whole Plate[0]," a multi-part primer on film theory presented through the analysis of Michael Bay's Transformers films.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRXI__Wixas&list=PLJGOq3JclTH8J73o2Z4VMaSYZDNG3xeZ7
His Transformers movies also have a horrendous amount of product placement
> On TV, the ground rules are clearer: Ads come when the show takes a break.
Oh, you sweet summer child. TV and film would love you to believe that, but today product placement omnipresent. Michael Bay's Transformers movie is basically an ad for General Motors occasionally interrupted by robots. It's not enough to jam product placement into every inch of cinema being produced today. They now also go back retroactively insert product placement into older productions[1].
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/old-videos-new-ads-advertisings-shocking-next-frontier-200619/
Hi, I’d like a ticket for the new transformers movie, but id there are any explosions I want my money back.
Sure that’s just negotiation, but in that case I’d argue just as well that the costumer is being unresonable because he has expectations of the experience that simply don’t align with what is being offered. And if the establishment decides not to take your business because of the unusual request, which is wierdly dependent on how things play out I would not hold it against them.
As for not wanting clues, you can just tell them not to provide them and they wont. No need for the weird conditional payment option. You’re taking away a timeslot no matter what and costing them money, if you want to do that you need to pay, wanting special conditions on that payment is “rather harsh”.
> I've found with experience and heavy linting you can avoid the vast majority of bugs.
No, you can't.
In fact, I can't even begin to see how "apply this specific standard to the code" (linting) is even remotely related to "know everything about this particular domain so you don't make any mistakes in creating an application for it" or "know everything about this particular system so that a given difference in configuration screws up your application at run time".
You seem to be primarily a java developer so I understand why you prefer avoiding tests (among the many things that Java makes absurdly difficult, writing tests is one of them) but you should still write tests .
Look at any serious open source project, most of them have hundreds, thousands of tests. It's almost presumptuous to think that one knows more than the community.
> I swear it's like 95% bug reduction.
The only situation where linting really causes that much of an impact, that I've seen, is in an application where a huge portion of the code was just connecting or boilerplate that should've been brought from third party libraries anyway, and was written only because of the NIH syndrome.
Mind you, having code style is necessary so that any given developer can quickly get up to speed and more easily review other developer's code, but it doesn't (nor it shouldn't) tell you whether whatever you wrote actually works.
Assuming otherwise is like pretending that a movie featuring state of the art special effects, cinematography, etc, isn't still Transformers or similar garbage.
> Basically, men looking at women harms them, and we should avert our eyes
This is not what "male gaze" means. The idea of a male gaze, broadly speaking, is that the way women are portrayed in visual media (films, painting, photography, video games) caters to a male, heterosexual audience over other audiences, even at the expense of other aspects of the art. I think Lindsay Ellis does a good job of explaining this with examples [1]; particularly striking is the way Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes in Transformers is shot to maximise her sex appeal (to a straight male audience), so that even though the script ostensibly establishes Mikaela as savvy and competent, all that most viewers remember is that she's eye candy [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNkTeHpHj_I [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKyrUMUervU&t=1m05s
Ok, this is the 'theory' of the internet, and I'm inclined to agree with it.
But do you have any evidence that there are more talented musicians than ever?
Because they are lacking at my local hot spots - i.e. the bands coming to town are not showcasing much of this. Obviously this has a lot to do with pop culture tastes - and maybe this is the 'other side of the equation' ie 'demand'.
As for 'the commons' - no. There is no return sadly.
'Musician' used to be a job. If you wanted to hear music, it generally had to be live. When rock and roll came along, the number of horn player jobs dropped by 90% - because hey, now you only have a '5 piece' band instead of a '30 piece' band.
With electronic music - there are zero pieces in the band. Just a DJ to press play and to pretend he's busy with the knobs.
Tastes change, which is fine - and it's possible to do a lot with a computer, which is fine - but due to the lower barrier to entry - AND - the 'globalization' of music. FYI what is happening to pop is the same thing happening to Hollywood films, like 'Transformers' - there is literally no plot, just production values - a lot of music is being consumed in the developing world where often taste is simple.
So there are no jobs for musicians anymore, which makes it hard to be in the commons.
Another note on taste: music used to be pretty. It was something almost anyone could enjoy, on some level. All folk music is 'listenable'. All classical is 'listenable'. So is light rock, and easy Jazz. Broadway music - etc..
But some versions of rock, most of rap, 1/2 of hip hop - and a considerable amount of music is not 'unlistenable' to anyone but the people really into that genre. It's now really 'edgy' and contemporary.
For example - Trippie Red, SixNine - even a lot of JayZ - it's only going to ever appeal to a very small group of people. My Grandfather could feasibly listen to a Beyonce song. But he literally won't understand what the sound Trippie Red is making.
That there is talentless, mumbling over noise on video and touring, and that it gets vast attention - more than many musicians ... is problematic. Which gives rise to my final point hinted at above and that it's really just about popularity, not music. Trippie Red makes a little more sound than Kardashian and wears a different label - but it's almost the same thing.
FYI there's a good anecdote about Puff Daddy and is AR guys. His guys would come back from the club and say 'we found a great new sound' and Puff would say 'but how do they look?'.
Getting a face tattoo today is more 'key' to getting acclaim than much else, because it really sticks out on instagram (ie visual) where the competition is.
I truly hope as you say there are actually more 'bedroom masters' than before, I don't see it but I hope I'm wrong.
I'm french, we have one of the weakest offer in the netflix world. It's still way, way more content I could (sanely) consume in my entire life.
I think the problem comes from something else.
Regularly I watch movies with friends: they can't appreciate many good movies anymore. They need fast attention catching stuff. Otherwise they get bored, they loose focus (even watch their phone), and it snowballs since they miss pieces of the movie used to construct it that eventually gives it life.
I see plenty of netflix watchers that do it on the side, while browsing the web, in the background of a social activity, or even watching another movie (!).
You cannot taste "Scott Pilgrim", "The Shawshank redemption", "12 monkeys", "Forest Gump", "Pain and Gain" and "Life is beautiful" if you watch them the way you gulp "Rogue 1", get drunk on "Avengers" or skim "Transformers". Just like you don't eat a burger and osters the same way if you want to enjoy both of them.
In fact, you can't appreciate anything special that way. The problem here is not netflix. It's that the way many people consume things now will always leave them unsatisfied.
Also, there is a quantity effect. You can now watch more than you should, and many do. But it will make you numb.
And to finish on a more positive note, the fact we have watched so many things now also educated us more to what's quality and what is not. It's fair we have now higher expectations.
Plenty of games require significant dedication. Mobas like DOTA and league of legends are immensely competitive, and have deep and intricate metagames. Simulation racing games are at least comparable to motorsport. Kerbal Space Program taught me more about space craft than any class or book.
Ultimately games are no different than any other medium. Like books, you've got your Twilights and you've got your The Old Man and the Sea. Like film you've got your Transformers and you've got The Godfather.
What is going to happen is reverse of what you say you want. The big Hollywood blockbusters will be just as available as before, what you are losing is the long tail of smaller independent films that may be more thought provoking or diverse.
If some streaming service has to cut 80% of its offerings, they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.
Even if they made more specific regulation to remove those blockbusters, which will annoy the general population, almost all regulation benefits the large incumbents in the long run. They have the resources to figure out how to game the system.
Yeah movies would be reduced to commercials. Commercials are free after all, so that proves it is possible. So we would probably still have movies like Transformers and Star Wars, so I guess geeks would be happy.
It's a good point, but I don't think it's 'price'.
Music is 'homogenized' for the same reason products are: labels are making 'lowest common denominator' for the same reason 'Transformers' has no plot whatsoever.
Radio and Google searches, 'hype' are ironically more commercialized than ever before, ergo, music is more 'product'.
There is actually 'more diversity' in music - but you have to actually expend a little bit of effort to find it. An I mean 'just a little bit' i.e. a search on iTunes or whatever. Most people do not consume music that way - they just don't care that much. They accept what's on the radio, or what their friends tell them and esp. for younger folks, they are influenced by marketers trends.
Consider the parallel: there are more 'web sites' than ever before, and the web is far more diverse - yet - our time is more and more focused on a smaller subset of places i.e. FB, Amazon.
A couple of nuanced things:
'Making music' is easier than ever, and what is considered 'music' is more broad - so anyone can spend a few minutes using off-the-shelf software to make a few interesting sounds and voila. Eddie Van Halen spent a decade nerding out in his basement practicing to develop his talent - now - you don't have to like Van Halen, but if you actually listen, you can respect the talent. 'Talent' is no longer necessary - so this is a problem.
It completely blows me away that a lot of shows now are simply Kareoke - young guys were rapping over an mp3. Not very exciting to me, but even worse ... I saw something with 'Chief Keef' recently and he's not even rapping over a 'backing track' - he's literally just playing is regular release track and then drunk/high mumbling over top of the track. He stumbles around on stage with his buddies, and each of them mumble a few lines over top now and then.
Which brings me to 2cnd nuanced point: it's not about the music (maybe it never was) it's about the fame.
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are in the same business. One is more lyrical than the other. (FYI I think they are both geniuses in different ways, and I don't care for either of their fare but they are brilliant nonetheless). It's about creating a 'meme' - and wether it's instagram, or bits of acting, or 'music' or appearances, whatever - it's the same thing. It's almost impossible these days for a pop artist to be huge without having a very visual aspect. Taylor Swift's Instagram is at least as important as her albums. Her shows are massively produced spectacles. She and Beyonce are better described as pop-figure entertainers ... with a lot of music in the mix.
So the focus on pop-culture, and the visual aspect, has truly and fundamentally altered things.
Maybe some of you are old enough to remember: 'Video Killed the Radio Star' - since the social media revolution, this is further blown up.
I love all genres of music - but every genre has been blown up with really low grade stuff, almost written by a computer and you can hear it. Obviously EDM is worse than others because of the nature of the 'E' of course, but it's bad.
Final nuance: a great deal of the 'art' has shifted from classical musical paradigms, into the Engineering. So now, the 'producer' is in a way the 'chief artist'. We saw this in the late 20th century when U2 got popular. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanlois were producers on their huge hits - and you can clearly hear their impact. They were 'part of the band' in Bono's words. Radiohead has used the same Engineering guy forever and he's definitely a key ingredient in their secret sauce. Max Martin writes 100% of Katy Perry and other's hits and he, together with Dr. Luke basically own the hot-100 of known entities.
And of course ... in the early 20th century if you wanted to hear music, someone had to play it really. You needed a full orchestra for good music. When the 5-piece rock and roll band came along 90% of horn players had to get other jobs. When Ableton/Steinberg/GarageBand came along ... well, you don't need any musicians at all to make music.
Clearly there's a lot of intelligence even in the most mundane pop music, just as it's not actually easy to make 'Transformers' films, but the artistry is more focused on production than art ... and with so much 'noise' in the long-tail, it's exceedingly difficult for decent talent to break through.
I was never a fan of Van Halen, but I happed to see them in an Arena concert several years ago and it was absolutely amazing. The music seems 'passe' and cheezy on the radio, but live ... it's basically exhilarating. They are the definition of 'Stadium Rock' and enormously talented. Imagine Dragon's doesn't hold a candle to them it would almost be comical listening to them side by side live.
Edit: should not that the biggest money makers are the 'established brand' live acts, like 'Journey' and 'Bruce Springsteen' are making zillions more money than ever in 2018, 30 years after the fact - i.e. 'new artists' now have to compete with massive bands that are still truckin'. Check Billboard 200 album list, towards the middle you find: Nirvana's 'nevermind', Metallica 'black' and Guns n Roses 'apetite for destruction' on the chart for like the last 6 years (!) and might be for another decade (!) so 'new artists' literally have to outsell 20 year old Metallica albums to get listed. Rough!
Laughable, huh?
>Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator.
On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives.
...
When the CIA established an entertainment liaison office in 1996, it made up for lost time, most emphatically on the Al Pacino film The Recruit and the Osama bin Laden assassination movie Zero Dark Thirty. Leaked private memos published by our colleague Tricia Jenkins in 2016, and other memos published in 2013 by the mainstream media, indicate that each of these productions was heavily influenced by government officials. Both heightened or inflated real-world threats and dampened down government malfeasance.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washington-dc-films-fbi-24-intervening-close-relationship-a7918191.html
I'd say Transformers did a pretty good job of doing what it set out to do (make money) even if you and I don't care for it :-)
Certainly there are good "little" movies that get made on a relative shoestring. And even more shorts and arthouse fare. And modern video equipment makes it a lot easier to mostly use natural lighting and the like.
That said, mainstream TV and movies have made most of our standards pretty high. I'm always somewhat amazed by how much gear gets brought in by a video crew to shoot a few minutes of talking heads to use on a company web site.
Michael Bay's documentary Transformers
I hope this isn't considered devolving the thread but that episode of Radiolab mentioned above certainly made it seem, to me, the issue was about censoring movie makers.
If you're on the left you more likely than not like Michael Moore movies. They are often very political. Should they be banned? That was the topic that came up in Radiolab.
Citizens United, inspired by Michael Moore's movies, decided they wanted to do the same thing. Someone decided Citizens United didn't have the same rights to release movies with a political message as Michael Moore and the studios that funded and distributed his movies. The Supreme Court I think saw the problem. Where does it end? Is Transformers political speech? Is Sense8 political speech? Is Milk?
I don't know how to solve the issue of getting money out of politics but I can at least see the argument that deciding which movies are political and which are not is not as easy as it sounds. Maybe Michael Moore's movie should have been prevented from release within N months before the election? I think that was the actual law used to prevent Citizen's United's movie coming out even though Moore's came out within the same type of time frame before an election.
"I don't think there is less art in a massively popular song. It's just a different kind of art"
Technically you could say thins, but in reality I would say there is definitely 'less art'.
Katey Perry is a product, not an artist, listening to her reminds me of walking into a nice, clean, new McDonald's.
Sure there is 'art' even in Product Marketing and Segmentation ... but funny enough, most of this music does not last.
I have nothing against great and hyper-specialized production, but it's usually done in an industrial manner.
The same thing is often done with food ingredients: there are people hired by processed food manufacturers to get the 'ingredient mix' just perfect for taste - and this tends to commoditize products across the board.
The article makes a good case for this, i.e. why hyper specialization and product orientation leads to less diversity.
Example from another industry: as films become more 'global' - they have to be more bland and generic, and 'lowest common denominator'. International audiences don't 'get' American cultural cues.
Do you know why the Transformers movies make absolutely no sense? There is basically no plot. Just 2 hours of a long, ridiculous action sequence? Because they are catering to 'everyone' and 'everyone' is borderline illiterate, and doesn't grasp cultural references outside of their little region etc. etc..
Katey Perry to me is the 'Transformers' of Music.
I have to think the people who keep coming back for one installment after another don't despise the movies. And in fact I remember being dragged to Transformers II by an ex who really wanted to see it because she enjoyed the first one.
You'd think so, but Michael Bay's Transformers franchise is widely despised by critics and fans (and rightly so), and also makes hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars worldwide.
When you have audacity, nostalgia and guaranteed merchandising potential you don't need the movie to be good, unfortunately.
This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles.
Sound is part of the film license in the US and Europe. This includes music and songs within the film. Studios pay out big bucks to license songs for films.
For example: my current employer would pay a license of approximately $500 to license major label music that will be played at an event to a live audience, broadcast globally, and streamed to 10 million viewers. (The total music budget for a 3-day event is maybe $5000, and that covers hours of music.) A movie studio licensing that same song for a movie would pay a minimum of $25,000, just for that song, assuming that it's part of the back catalog. A song that made the top 100 of the Billboard lists when it was released could command more than $100,000.
> Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country!
Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood").
The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately from the rights to show the movie. This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles.
It just isn't worth the effort in most cases to negotiate the Transformers English titles in France, for example.
Movie industry licensing and asset packaging are stuck in a time when you had to move physical reels of tape and film around, and still haven't caught up to digital technology.
Not all of the games involved were mtx-based. One was more like "you screwed up the IP I love, die!"
edit: Also, it is profoundly unhelpful to the discussion to say what you said, which is basically "Well, what did you expect, a pat on the back?"
We're talking here about abuse, not constructive criticism. Here's an analogy: Nobody expects an Oscar for working on Transformers 6, but personally subjecting them to online abuse for it is totally unacceptable. There's no need to come into the discussion and remind us that Transformers 6 is not likely to be a very good movie.
I do not recommend watching Transformers (the movies) for you.
The last (and final) one I watched (just to see how bad it was) had a 30 second (I am not shitting you) beer commercial complete with the signature Michael Bay 360 degree shot.
And not to mention the Chinese - "we must call central government" - pandering.
Transformers, G.I. Joe, Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man, My Little Pony... all either toys first or simultaneously created as toys. Usuaslly a good giveaway is when Hasbro or Mattel is mysteriously the creator of the show.
Of course this isn't just a Western phenomenon, the video game/anime/movie/card game/merchandise extravaganza that is and always was Pokemon being probably the best single example.
Very true. I hope one day we can have a better premium media market than we have currently so that businesses feel less pressured to appeal to everyone. I don't think you could pay me to sit through a Transformers movie but I would have paid $25 to see the Hateful Eight in theaters.
Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that American movies have had to be more generic in their themes and dialog to be easier to translate/localize for the Chinese. Ghostbusters and Deadpool were not eligible for China's market because of their supernatural and otherwise offensive content, so it's not hard to believe that moviemakers will have to work harder to justify such content [2].
As an American, seeing these examples is still kind of amusing to me in a karmic way. I assume whatever annoyance or alienation I feel is just a small bit of how the rest of the world has felt the past 50 years, having to regularly adapt to and adopt strange influences and demands because they were popular in America (Sorry about "Jersey Shore", high fructose corn syrup, the backlash against MSG, and the cocaine trade).
[0] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-china-blame-global-avocado-shortage.html
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage-europe/index.html
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/did-you-catch-the-ways-hollywood-pandered-to-china-this-year
"absolutely nothing to say" is a bit extreme. The Winter Soldier had a very clear political message, Guardians has always been about artificial family, every origin story movie is an individual overcoming some relatable human flaw. They aren't complicated, but they aren't Transformers/BvS.
The victory lap movies tend to fall into your categorization at least (Avengers, Civil War, maybe Thor 3).
Personally I've found that it's the other way around: watching tedious, confusing, sterile CGI action sequences in contemporary movies like the Transformers series requires an attention span that I just don't have. I'd much rather watch Orson Welles just stare at a wall if I had to choose.
Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options).
Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean it is objectively 'the best'.
Every big production that is a step above Transformers is hailed as a masterpiece these days. I don't know how the movie majors can convince critics to write what they do, but I'm sure it's marketing. I'll go to watch this movie anyway (the director is an interesting one) but I'm quite confident it's just formulaic commercial crap (you could see it from the trailers, really).
I've never read Dan Brown. I do remember a friend reading The DaVinci Code and thinking the book was garbage. I have watched the movie Angels and Demons and thought it was ok, but nothing special. Now I stumble on a discussion of a bunch of software engineers discussing how much Dan Brown's books suck. Most of these people are as skeptical as you can be when it comes to matters of religion and faith, so it's not like they're hating on Dan Brown because of his choice in subject matter, the way one might accuse me (I'm a person of devout Christian faith). So honest question. Does Dan Brown really suck that much? If yes, why are his books so popular? It seems that either he's a good writer or he's managed to hit a nerve that people latch onto due to their own preconceived desires. If it's the latter, then does Dan Brown sell to his readers the way that President Trump sells to his base or Michael Bay sells Transformers movies to me? Donald Trump doesn't seem to have a clue what he's doing sometimes (I'm Canadian, so again, outsider perspective), but his base seems eat him up due to his message. Everyone says that the Transformers movies suck, but I just love watching big robots bashing each other so much that I can't tell if they're bad movies; the movies seemed fine to me. Is Dan Brown in this category? Or is it possible that all of these learned and analytical people in this discussion are wrong and he's actually a good writer?
It'll never happen, but a sequel to the WarCraft movie would be nice. Might be nostalgia for playing so many hours of War.exe, and rereading the manual over and over again as a kid, but I thought it wasn't half bad. I'll take it over another Transformers movie...
If those people do, why are the studio executives complaining? Perhaps it's because "Ticket revenue was down at least 12 percent, and ticket sales were at their lowest point for the season in 10 years. Audiences did not want to see remakes of old TV shows (bad news for Baywatch and CHIPS). They did not want to see badly reviewed franchise entries (the take for the latest Transformers installment was way down)."[1] (linked from the article).
[1]: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/dunkirk-girls-trip-are-brights-spots-in-a-bummer-summer-20170825.html
If only... It still works more often that it should. A huge number of productions of bad acting, terrible writing and copy/pasta all over the place. But they still score good.
I've yet to understand how something like transformers have so good ratings. Even as action movies they are terrible.
As long as customers still vote with their money for piles of garbages, they will release more garbage.
Our CS1010 teacher in college used to test us on movies. I believe one year he had done inception. Other years he did transformers, Star Wars etc.
Let's say we have a sixty second shot, where two actors throw ten lines of dialogue back and forth at eachother. Let's say that one out of ten takes on a line is good.
It will take far more then ten minutes to film this. The actors may nail line #1 and #2, but flub #3 or #4, or #7 or look at the wrong thing, or the director won't like something about their emotions, or whatnot.
You have to do an entire re-take, whenever one little thing doesn't go as you want.
Compare that to a short-shot film. Have each actor fire off twenty takes of their four second line. If they got tongue-tied on the pronunciation of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they didn't waste an entire take.
Hell, with short shots the two actors don't even need to be in the same building for filming a scene, let alone on the same set at the same time. Do takes for one on Monday, do takes for the other one on Tuesday. It works better for everyone's schedules, and we can't afford to pay Scarlett Johansson to hang out on set any longer then she has to. Three months later, the director will decide that they really hate one of the shots, and it can be re-filmed during post-production.
The reason that this happens is because filming is expensive, budgets are bloated, celebrity actors command multi-million dollar salaries, editing is easy, and audiences will happily lap up action schlock like Michael Bay's Transformers (With its average of 3.2 seconds per shot.)
My SO works in musical theater. They don't have the privilege of stitching together a show from perfect four second intervals. They have to perform it right from start to finish - a two hour ordeal. This requires many, many weeks of grueling rehearsals... And each performance has many, many mistakes.
It's a GM, so it looks like it was made to appear in a Transformers movie and people trust a largely unproven manufacturer like Tesla to make something more reliable.
For some reason I just re-watched the first two transformers movies. (I don't know. They were still bad, but I like robots.)
The funny thing is that he is not only pro-military, he's anti-government. It's not just that the military has to be seen in a good light, other government people have to also be seen as bad.
yeah exactly. also you didn't need a freedom of information act to know this. I remember generals / DOD officials talking about it in a TV interviews (1996 independence day, 2007 transformers). directors are overly focused on realism for better or for worse, so a lot also goes to providing stock footage for inspiration, advice, and fact checking like 'is this aircraft meant for the role its portrayed in the movie'. etc.
and as they said openly in the interviews: they often do it for free, but if they dont like the content they will pull out.
My pick for year is 1878. I'd love to see your examples.
But really, how do you quantify good? Taste is subjective. The original Transformers move is a great example. I didn't like it. but i believe 14 year old me would have absolutely loved it.
It's similar to the statistics about Word users only use 5% of the functionality of Word. But everybody uses a different 5%.
I guess if you want to go by money, i'm going to pick 1939. I'd guess about $18,000,000 in production expenses, and about $240,000,000 in box. [1] (arbitrarily assigning 1,000,000 to the unlisted numbers, but keeping the box at $0 for unlisted numbers) Seems like a pretty good ROI. (although i think of, Gone with the wind, Mr Smith goes to washington, and the Wizard of Oz as subjectively good. 25% is a pretty good percentage)
Kind of a fun exercise poking through the years. 1997 was a standout, but everything i looked at had memorable and fun movies. I don't think any year would hit that 25% mark though.
[1] http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/year/1939
> but evidently some market analysis must have proven that "wrong" for studio executives
I think that might have been the Transformers movie series and similar successful reboots that appeal to a very broad audience. Those are basically effects movies with additional hype generated by a pre-existing fandom.
I wonder if most films can even be considered art under some of the definitions being used. Is Michael Bay's Transformers art? Was _The Phantom Menace_ art?
There are video games that are completely "on the rails", effective interactive movies that provide little choice. Some of these are basically like modern art exhibits that invite people to walk through and interact with sculptures or animatronics, only it's virtual, instead of physically real.
I have seen kids cry over the writing in Undertale. Games like Journey, The Last Of Us, Firewatch, the Bioshock series, either provoke emotion, or thought.
There are indie games that let you experience what it's like to have a child with cancer, or be a subsistence farmer in a developing country, transformative experiences that IMHO are more powerful than static art.
Art doesn't always have to be abstract, photojournalism can be deeply artistic, merely by capturing perspective on the world that are real, but ignored. Virtual reality experiences in games could extend that to actually allowing people to experience what it is like from the perspective of the photojournalist, or those affected. This could have greater impact on one's thoughts than just visiting a museum and looking at paintings or pictures removed from context.
I'm willing to bet that this whole argument is swept under the rug in one or two decades, when a new generation of artists who are extremely digitally savvy supplant the current establishment, and new forms of media will eventually come to be seen as art.
Leased CGI sets / models / scenes.
Building full fledged models / generations of popular cities and places and leasing them to film producers. Its cheaper for them to lease than it would be to hire full devs and designers to start from scratch..I know there is some 're-use' in place by these companies such as pixar and disney. Re-use is not what i am talking about though. I am talking about movies like transformers / godzilla / etc which need on point rendering of actual cities and places.
Just a thought I had the other day when reading how film companies were struggling with growing movie budgets and diminishing returns.
I live in Los Angeles, specifically the west side; hardly a day goes by that I don't see a Ferrari pull out of the Sony Studios facility, a 50-person crew filming 2 actors talking next to a cafe, or an action scene that closes down part of a freeway, with 100s of police, security, helicopters, etc. around. Many scenes of Grey's Anatomy are filmed in what is almost my back yard, and they often involve a dozen camera-crew trucks, staff of 60+ people, etc. I just cringe when I think of the cost.
What most people want is a great story, and great dialog. I'm not talking about the audience for a Transformers movie, I don't watch them but some do; that is a different story, and the animation can be done, and is being done, more cheaply outside of Hollywood already. But what I'm saying is that if you can write a great script and have a great story with great dialog, there are plenty of hungry, often young (age isn't relevant BTW) people with RED 4K cameras who can film and edit and put together a great product for $3M, not $30M or $100M.
The days of Brad Pitt getting $30M for a movie, of Julia Roberts getting $25M, are coming to and end. It might take 5 years, or 10 years, or even a generation, but it will happen. Same thing to studio execs; the days of drinking champagne for breakfast and lighting Cuban cigars with $100 bills will end. IT JUST IS NOT SUSTAINABLE, NECESSARY, OR COMPETITIVE ANYMORE. (Sorry for shouting, but that is the crux of my point). 30 years ago, there was no internet to speak of, there were no RED (or Canon, etc.) cameras, there were no "prosumer" drones with HD cameras, non-western countries were isolated and not part of the global workforce, etc.
That has all changed. It is just very easy to put together a great product for less, and all must adjust. It happened to IT, computing and programming, and it's happening to entertainment.
Now that we're grown up, the transformers "movies" are really commercials for General Motors products. I seem to recall one movie even having just a dozen or so frames of the new Corvette before it was publicly available.
It varies a lot. E.g. the Transformers movies are poster-children for overdone 3D for the sake of making the effects look cooler, while in Prometheus the 3D looks fantastic but is subtle enough that they don't become the focus of any of the shots.
Interesting. Thanks for answering all of my questions in this thread.
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised there were any untouched cities left for Michael Bay to destroy after already having made three previous Transformers films.
It's funny you mention this, because I went to law school for a while and love law in the way that mathematicians love theorems. Hollywood does have quite a lot of lawyers working on scripts - or rather, the ownership and business development of them. Lawyers have high standing within the professional film community; in fact the best way to get a producer to look at a script is to have it sent in by an entertainment lawyer, and quite a lot of lawyers write fiction because they're professionally trained to analyze and explain complex narratives insofar as they do trial/appeal work.
My thesis is not that Hollywood doesn't know stuff or won't hire experts, but that Nerds (in various fields) don't appreciate the business necessity to dumb the story down for the widest possible audience. Nerds are very interested in their specialist subject and often lose sight of the fact that too much detail is boring.
stories are ultimately about emotional identification, and too much intellectual detail can be just as boring as too much action (eg Michael Bay's Transformers films are often criticized for fight scenes that are so long and intense that people lose track of who's winning and after a while stop even caring, because it's just one big explosion after another).
If I made an accurate movie about lawyers at work, lawyers and paralegals would love it, and I might even have a small indie hit on my hands if the other elements were good. But most people would be bored to tears because they don't have all the background knowledge and experience to fully appreciate it, and they want to be entertained more than they want to be educated.
Excellent summation and glad you could share your perspective. Like you point out, it genuinely takes money to create a quality product that meets expectations - you know, feels like a good film. I guess that's why it's kind of funny to watch knock-offs / direct-to-VOD like "Transmorphers" and instantly see why "Transformers" cost something like $100,000 per day during some of their more elaborate scenes (outlier I'm sure but I believe that figure / rumor).
The professionals in industries like yours make things look easy, so to speak, in that understanding behind-the-scenes effort and organization is absolutely staggering to witness first hand. I've done some minor level sound work (boom mic) but also drop in on some sets when filming around town, like Fox's cancelled "The Good Guys" and I can really appreciate the intensity and costs associated with such productions.
The internet is a lot like an open mic night, and in this regard, there are some gems to be found, but it's going to take wading through a whole lot of...ugh...
Is this the same John Rogers that helped write the story for the newest 'Catwoman' and 'Transformers' movies?
I'm not so sure he's in the best position to qualify as a literary critic.
Aside from some basic benefits, it mostly encourages people to make judgements about important things ('human relationships') based on the most absolutely material, fleeting and trivial physical elements. Especially given the magnitude of 'choice', it commoditizes people. Even worse, it normalizes this behaviour. Far from connecting us, it actually disconnects us.
Talking recently to a female friend recently who is on Tindr ... it was pretty astonishing how numb she'd become to the profiles... absolute objectification. Even as she was fairly self-aware about it.
It's about as healthy as nicotine.
Admittedly, it's an absolutely brilliant business model, tapping into primal forces, but it's not a step forward. It's a step sideways, at best, and maybe even a little step back.
When VC meets creativity meets technology, it will induce a lot of dollars in this direction irrespective of long term positive economic or social outcomes, often taking attention away from 'better' causes. Absent reasonably enlightened consideration (and I mean just 'basic' consideration, not some holier-than-though ideology), there is no moving forward - just moving in random directions, pulled by the arbitrary forces of hyper-populist memes and trends. Some will make a lot of $$$ as the money sloshes around in a zero-sum game, but surely, but that really isn't the point. In the long run, the Valley and tech scene will lose authenticity and be about as credible as politicians, homeopaths, or Amway.
I'll bet $100 that anyone working in tech or any other industry for more than 5-8 years, will start to understand that it's not about 'a job' or 'making bling', or 'being startup famous' and that they work they do has impact across cultures and communities, and that they are ultimately responsible for whatever it is they are working on. Given that there are 10 000 projects around to chose from, it's hot hard to climb higher on the ladder than Tindr, by almost any measure, even $$$.
I don't really care about Tindr that much, I have about as much 'against it' as I do a ridiculous Transformers film (which is nothing), but it's not worth any attention either.
I'm looking forward to Pokemon :)
So do porn, gambling, and films like 'Transformers' that literally have no plot.
French movies don't generally suck, just like not all US produced movies are great. Some are considered classics, for example the work of Godard. A lot of Hollywood movies objectively suck, yet they are billion dollar enterprises. There are plenty examples, such as most of the 4th of July Disaster movies, Transformers, a lot of the super hero movies, etc.. They are objectively trash, yet have a huge impact on young people all over the world.
I feel like you've just written half of the script for the next Transformers movie.
Yes, tech workers often are just pieces of office furniture these days, and so getting to be cool rustic armoir is better than being a lame ottoman.
This is an important lesson for undergrad CS majors. Instead of working really hard to master dynamic programming or taking that extra course on programming language concepts, you should instead just watch Michael Bay's Transformers movie so that you know when to say "Furrier Transform" at the right moment.
Seriously. Go right now and buy a pair of purely decorative eye glasses. At work tomorrow, got stand by the coffee machine and let your glasses slide slightly down your nose. Wait for an important-seeming person to walk by and then push your glasses up and say "Furrier Transform" -- this is a much faster way to a promotion than coding at your desk.
Be wearing a slim-fitting hoodie if at all possible. If your MacBook doesn't already have stickers reflecting which causes you SJW on reddit, get some now!!!!11
Laugh tracks? The Transformers movies?
> Why oh why can't journalists just respect his wishes!
Because it's their job not to. Lots of people don't want to be found but it's in the public interest to find them.
I'd argue the same goes for the creator of Bitcoin. It's in the public interest to find this person and see what they stand to gain from Bitcoin's continued use and value, and what they are likely to do with the money. You will respond that it doesn't matter, but it does.
What if Bitcoin came from Iran's secret service and it will be used to fund an enrichment facility?
What if it came from a drug lord?
What if it came from Michael Bay and he's going to make yet another Transformers movie with it?
All of these are in the public interest to find out and make people reconsider their adoption of it.
A decision void of context is necessarily an ignorant decision.
And I wouldn't call the Hollywood situation of giving multi-million dollar budgets to BS like Transformers and spare change to far better movies a "fair allocation" either when it comes to artistic merit.
To be fair, the title asks about its appeal, not artistic merit. Transformers is a shitty film, but it certainly has appeal.
Soviet cinema had lots of masterpieces without "fair allocation of capital" (and lots of corruption one would presume).
And I wouldn't call the Hollywood situation of giving multi-million dollar budgets to BS like Transformers and spare change to far better movies a "fair allocation" either when it comes to artistic merit.
When it comes to art, allocation of capital and "efficient markets" just means more popular works get more money -- it doesn't say anything about their quality, which is part of what the article is about.
(Expecting accusations of 'elitism', I'm not talking about esoteric, self-congratulatory arthouse films either. The Godfellas for example, a mighty good movie, is anything but that, or Pulp Fiction (or, at their era, The Searchers, Vertigo etc.).
I think you've missed the joke...
This link seems more relevant: http://illuminatiwatcher.com/illuminati-freemason-symbolism-in-transformers-films/
My experience has shown that the only movies worth looking at are rated > 7/10 anything below is mostly crap.
But this only works for movies that are mainstream BUT not too real blockbusters. Because stuff like the fast and the furious or transformers gets good ratings anyways.
But I use such ratings only to get something light on a boring evening.
Mostly I watch ArtHaus stuff and don't look at those ratings.
It might just be sample bias. While users of Rotten Tomatoes are more serious and critical movie watchers, Fandango users are probably more casual movie goers who can enjoy any movie. If I'm out on a date and want to have some fun, I don't care that much about the quality of a movie. Some stupid action flick like Transformers is fine.
> What if I told you a lot of people find Transformers: Dark of the Moon as pretentious and vapid as its title is ?
Then I guess I'd say "yeah, probably"? I haven't seen any of the Transformers movies past the first one myself, but I hear they're pretty shit.
> If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
Crass anti-intellectualism.
I like the Sundance Festival, Movies from all over the world and wouldn't got see 2012 on screen but I don't go pissing online on fans of Transformers.
Your definition of `artsy and pretentious' is just `things I don't like'.
The author might be mistaken. I think there's a pretty chance this is simply a demographical difference between the sites' visitors, and I'm pretty disappointed this wasn't brought up early on.
Rotten Tomatoes is a hipstometer (if you don't believe me, look at the artsy film festival movies that rank highest there, or read some of the pedantic reviews). Fandango is what a lot of the RT fans would call a "low brow" venue. More Hollywood-ish (huge budget, unrealistic, etc.) movies (transformers, 2012, The Fast & The Furious, etc.) rank well on fandango, but not on Rotten Tomatoes. The really great movies rank well on both (e.g., Captain Philips, Life of Pi, etc.).
It's always been this way. I use a specific formula of Fandango, iTunes and Rotten Tomatoes scores to decide on a movie. If Fandango ranks it 4-5 stars and Rotten Tomatoes ranks it 50-70%, it's usually really good. If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
"I am convinced that the Popcorn Time-killer is going to be a Netflix without borders. They should remove national restrictions for films,..."
Does someone have some insight into why Netflix has time and geographic restrictions on content? I can understand, in some cases, publishers not wanting to let their movies or TV out to foreign countries. (Maybe waiting for a marketing push, or a broadcast deal to be reached in a new market/locale) But I can't really wrap my head around movies and shows being phased in and out. (Example: Recently saw that some of the Transformers movies will disappear in a week or two).
From a technical standpoint, I can't see the issue being that they can only have a certain number of films view-able. from an economic standpoint, I would think that whenever someone watches a show, a portion of their monthly Netflix fee goes to the creators of that show, so there's always an incentive for the creators to let Netflix show their content.
I feel like this move is too early for Netflix strategy-wise for non-power users. Yes, it may be the case that their early adopters plow through premium TV, but I'd like to investigate more to understand if people choose Netflix to have the option fo view movies like Transformers, licensed from Epix.
This move would happen eventually as creators gain access to streaming (distribution) platforms and platforms (like Netflix) start creating. Each player is only gaining margin and then succeeding in locking in users.
As a user, I would have preferred to see Netflix take the agency approach and allow streaming titles to take a percentage cut of revenue (although this would be difficult to calculate and bad for blockbuster hits who seek to increase risk and reward). This would mean Netflix competes on technology while content creators compete on price. If I were an investor, again I say this move is too early but one that, as the article mentions, was inevitable in the current model.
This type of news reminds me of that scene from the first (live action) Transformers movie where the girl hacker is telling the three-letter suit types that they need to be thinking in a whole other level of technology in order to understand their adversary.
I suppose though, that this means if you have /critical/ security things it really just means you need to have the kind of physical security you hear about in scifi and fictional spy game settings. Not just plain airgaps, but proper Faraday cages, and even vibration dampening (for servers too, not just 'meeting rooms'). Probably even thermal regulation so that there's always /consistent/ output.
Merely an amateur here who's done some demo tapes at the zenith of my career. But if I had to guess, it would be tied to how we listen to music live. In a _Transformers_ movie, as an example, you have explosions in front of you, missiles whizzing from behind, cars screeching from the left, etc. Surround sound is useful to create an immersive experience. The Beatles' White Album, meh, not so much. What, we'll put John and Paul up front, George rear left, and drums go...? Because that's not what you'd hear live. The Who tried quadraphonic sound on _Quadrapenia_, as did a few others back in the day. It obviously didn't go over big.
The simple answer is the more likely idea that iPod headphones only do two channels.
Given the descriptions usually associated with subraces like the Drow or Mountain Dwarves I'm not sure if the racial stereotyping is a lot more offensive than the fact that the groups as portrayed have non-existent or stone-age economies. You know why Dwarves aren't portrayed as reading books? Because they're not portrayed as owning books or anything beyond pickaxes for that matter.
Games and game worlds can and have been designed differently but this is how D&D is. There's definitely space for critical commentary, but complaining about it or calling it "evil" is like complaining about the physics in a "Transformers" movie. If you want an accurate simulation of reality, there's reality. Or GURPS.
The transformers movies are a great example of this.
I went through a phase like you describe - where I was consuming media (books, television, film, anything) as a means of exploring. With exploring you're focusing on learning, on looking outward. I've only recently come back to re-experiencing things.
It's definitely best when you get to explore the historical themes of media then go back to something. For a very basic example - watch Lion King, read Hamlet, then go back and re-watch Lion King, you'll pick up things you hadn't the first time (works best if you wait some time).
It turns out this also helps me determine the quality of whatever media I'm consuming. Only particularly fantastic things keep being enjoyable. But I won't let that stop me from enjoying the latest Transformers movie ;)
> Its all about hard cash.
Quite. Studios have minimaxed their money making capabilities, and (generally) no longer take 70s style gambles on films like "The Godfather".
This is only exacerbated by the fact that it seems people are prepared to pay for the likes of "Transformers" but the people who claim to want more interesting/niche films aren't prepared to shell out for them, whether because they keep their money in their pockets, torrent them, or whatever.
I'd argue its different because the music industry only really every had one lever - marketing and distribution, and the internet made the former really cheap and destroyed the latter. Taylor Swift's label is technically an indie label, and I'm willing to bet the budget and people employed in the production of her latest album is a tiny fraction of what Michael Bay employed in his latest Transformers flick.
Due to the huge budgets and returns movies still have, studios are a lot closer to venture capital firms than distributors. If it ever contracts it would likely be in the form of making less content and making safer bets rather than paying everyone less.
The other half being providing a service they find worthwhile that doesn't change at every whim.
Taken to the other extreme, a constantly breaking Github doesn't have any value proposition.
Promises are not always explicit and not at all related to laws.
The next Transformers being something to look forward to is a promise, but that doesn't mean not liking it is in any way wrong or that I could sue someone for it. I can choose to leave the movie and never go see one again. The producers of Transformers certainly owe me nothing, but they also cannot tell me how to feel about their handling of the material.
Github promises the most awesome code hosting around. That's a very different thing for many people. And to some people you can live up to the promise, to some people you cannot and it's perfectly fine for those to feel let down. Calling all those people "entitled" is, quite frankly, insulting.
As I said: putting this like it is the end of the world is overreaching, but it is a valid complaint and a valid sentiment. Saying that this is the most important thing on Github, because it happens to be specific your problem is entitlement.
Finally, it isn't true that you are only bound by spelled out things. The law many people cite so often has the concept of Good Faith: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_%28law%29 and similar fun things that extend beyond that. So Github _does_ owe me beyond their ToS. (I appreciate that this is probably not a case covered by this)
It's a common sentiment in these circles that only the rules written on the contract are the ones that count, while nothing can be further from the truth, widely varying from legislation to legislation.
for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are
This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences - Michael Bay's Transformers films are particularly egregious offenders in this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi-propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story).
It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times. Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to the audience.
Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large-budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle.
Don't forget the auto-playing trailer for the new Transformers movie, complete with audio.
Well outside of the first generation of transformers being made up of largely common cars you'd see on American roads and American military equipment (not a lot of Mercedes, Opels, Peugeots in the mix) and taking place in what appeared to be the American South West, desert with small mountains and valleys (with nearby American style suburbs the human characters lived in)....they changed this later, with a larger variety of settings. The Animated movie felt like it took place in somewhere, Europe.
Yeah Bumblebee was a VW Bug and Jazz was a Porsche, but there really weren't any other European cars in the show and both of those cars were pretty common in the U.S. Most importantly, Optimus Prime was very clearly an American style semi-truck rather than a British Lorry or Euro style truck.
I guess I wasn't clear though. Those shows really felt like they were at least reinforcing the prevailing propaganda, at a kids level. Part of this was no doubt marketing savvy rather than Government control, but it really made the propaganda machine pervasive, from young to old, top to bottom.
The modern movies are very much an extension of this. The Autobots are allied with Americans, operating out of a base provided by Americans. There's the occasional Aussie or Brit, but by and large it's all American. The cars are all GM cars. It feels natural because it's just an updating of what the Transformers were already doing.
It was brilliant. It tapped into so many threads floating around during the 80s and just pulled them together. High tech robots that fought evil and turned into blue collar American trucks! Bad ASS.
> Elon Musk launch Robots like Pacific Rim
Sarcos had the technology for full-body haptic feedback harnesses of the type that were somewhat portrayed in Pacific Rim, and they had this in the 90's, if I recall correctly. DARPA had arm/shoulder/head haptic feedback projects even back in the 70's and 80's.
The problem is that the human form factor is quite complex, and it will always be cheaper to make a simpler specialized tool. Humans are scary good at controlling things, even without haptic feedback.
Transformers: Just physically impossible for anything more functional than a movie prop. (Ok, maybe Monster Truck rallies.)
I'm one of the engineers working on this, I even make a semi-appearance in the video. I'm not really going to say much about it because it's a little annoying that it leaked out, and by such a crappy recording too, but -
a) I think the title here is pretty good, better than the hyperbolic one the Inquirer used.
b) Your middle two paragraphs are spot on
c) Given the video, it's understandable people are focused on the "actor as a virtual character" previsualization part ('but Avatar did this two years ago!', 'our game engine does that!', yadda yadda). That's only a small part of it, and honestly one of the less interesting ones.
I don't see what you think is condescending though. There's not a lot of difference today in the skill-set of a CG artist and a games artist. Generally they're just working to different budgets. (I say that as someone who spent 15 years working on console games).
The painstaking days of game artists building models that use less than 100 verts and hand-painting 256x256 textures are gone. Now, both your CG and game-artist build super-high resolution models, probably starting with something like ZBrush, then decimate down to whatever they need with the highres asset used to generate normal or displacement maps.
Optimius Prime in the original Transformers movie used ~20x more polygons than a PS4/Xbone game would today for a similar character. That's pretty amazing when you think that the GPUs in those machines are already handily outmatched by PCs, and the performance gains Nividia/AMD bring with every hardware cycle.
Hey everyone, I just got out of the editing bay and was really happy to see such a well thought out discussion playing out amongst the community. I wanted to take a moment to clarify my argument and respond to some of your comments in the hopes of furthering the conversation.
The major criticism I noticed was that I somehow misunderstood Graham's argument or that it functioned in such a way that subsumed mine. As I understood Graham's call to arms to kill Hollywood, he was soliciting entrepreneurs to start thinking about how to disrupt Big Media's grasp on the entertainment market. While I am whole heartedly against the practices of a Hollywood we all can agree is in a current rut (e.g. SOPA, DMCA takedowns, etc.) I do not believe that Hollywood has peaked, nor that his prescriptions for hastening its demise are feasible. I took his call as soliciting two options for responding to Hollywood:
a.) By creating more entertaining offerings that would create a zero-sum trade off with Hollywood's offerings ultimately rendering their products irrelevant.
b.) Leveraging technology to create alternate production and distribution mechanisms including new media and interactive programming offerings.
My argument takes a historical approach to examining how Hollywood has previously addressed similar disruptions citing the emergence of television and the rise/collapse of the studio system to begin thinking how one might approach “eating Hollywood's lunch”. Against alternative forms of entertainment and distribution mechanisms, one thing has remained consistent and that is the power of cinema be it in episodic television content or feature length material to consistently survive industry transformations and reorganizations. I think this historical pattern is owed to the nature of the medium itself which satisfies a very human need which is the transmission of stories. I believe that film more than any other medium has refined this craft, and in many ways developed the visual language through which we understand contemporary storytelling. Other mediums will of course tell stories, but I think only filmmaking for the foreseeable future will have the ability to tell stories with the richness and complexity we've evolved as a species to receive and share.
I think it's misguided to place a technologist's view of industry disruption before an examination of the medium's history because I believe it discounts the power of narrative and how we've found ourselves in this particular position. Despite Hollywood's current rut the market for film exhibition has only grown with foreign markets and alternative distribution mechanisms expanding the potential reach of Hollywood's content. I think what is needed now is a leveraging of technology to push film to its inherent potential to tell meaningful stories, what Hollywood once understood, rather than view it as a tool to destroy an industry.
A few of the comments that I thought particularly interesting/pertinent to respond to.
@Nileshtrivedi
I am assuming that the basic format of narrative television and features will remain a constant, due to the historical evolution of the form into its current iteration. Initially conceived films were exhibited at nickelodeons which served up customers short form content though it failed to evolve beyond a mere novelty that soon went through its own bust. It was Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, who championed the format as we currently know it drawing on his understanding of how storytelling dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and the great play-writes of yesteryear stumbled on a nearly universal structure for telling effective stories.
@KaiserPro
I absolutely agree the current pipeline of monetizing Hollywood's offerings is fundamentally broken and has to be done away with. Theatrical distribution demands enormous costs guaranteeing that we will only see low-risk content that has proven to be Hollywood's undoing. The internet and Video on Demand offers a chance to remove these costs in many ways and generate riskier fare delivered straight to the consumer.
@Walshemj and Djloche
Coming up through film school witnessing the rise of crowdfunding and the widespread adoption of digital filmmaking and editing, the costs must and absolutely can come down. These film's budgets assume a pipeline that requires enormous spends on development, production, distribution, print/advertising, and studio overhead. I think Vice offers a great example of how low-cost content paired appropriately with relevant niche markets can provide compelling entertainment alternatives to Hollywood's current offerings.
@Paulsutter
I am not by any means ruling out the inevitable evolution of entertainment offerings we'll see over the next twenty years, but I think to assume film will go away is a hard position to defend. I think it's far more likely that a medium which has demonstrated serious lasting power will evolve and adapt rather than be dismembered by dying conglomerates or new media offerings which will be in their infancy. Far more likely I believe we'll see something similar to the era of New Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies repeat itself.
@Betterunix
The claim that the vast majority of Hollywood's movies are terrible is really a subjective view. For every Transformers there are independent alternatives and risky studio films that sneak through the development pipeline. However, I do agree that the current system of exhibition necessitates a system of tent-pole event films that will inevitably sink the industry if left as it exists now. Look no further than what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had to say about the sustainability of the current Hollywood model.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-doomed-steven-spielberg-and-george-lucas-think-so-20130815
@Guard-of-terra
Absolutely, the star system underwent a fundamental shift with the introduction of television though its ability to adapt to the new pipeline I believe displays its lasting power. A really great read on the transformation the star system underwent with the introduction of television is “Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame,” by Ty Burr. A short excerpt that might address your comment.
“The essence of the broadcast revolution is simple: it offered a literal home theatre. No longer did you have to go out to see the stars and be entertained. Now they came to you. This affected the kinds of stars who were created from the 1950s on, in the sense that the people you let into your house are different from the people you pay to see in a theatre. They're more like you and me, for one thing, which also means you and I are more like the stars. For decades – until, arguably, the arrival of nighttime soaps in the 1970s and '80s – the most celebrated figures on the small screen evoked not glamour but ordinariness. They acted out comic and dramatic versions of our own dilemmas, or they filled history with life-sized personalities rather than the bigger-than-life stars of film.”
@Hayesdaniel
While I absolutely feel for you and everyone I know in the Visual Effects industry who has been clearly mistreated in the current system of studio filmmaking, I don't believe that the resolution of that issue is the most fundamental problem facing contemporary filmmaking. I think it's a symptom of larger ills that will need to be resolved. Ultimately I believe if we can't disrupt the model in its current form collectively secured bargaining rights and organization similar to how other industry groups such as the Screenwriter’s Guild or the Directors Guild of America could go a long way towards negotiating fair pay for visual effects studios and subsequently their employees.
@MaysonL
I didn't by any means set out to ignore the success of the video game industry or Pixax, but for my argument I didn't believe them wholly relevant. I think that Pixar offers a really great example how well crafted storytelling above all can be film's savior. They go to incredible lengths to develop and protect their stories, and it shows. However, I don't think that they are the answer to saving the industry either. I have a real fondness for everything Pixar is doing, one of the best storytellers I had the chance to know at film school now works there, but I think the trend of Pixarification of films is actually a threat to the kinds of film that will ultimately usher in a new era of Hollywood. You might enjoy what Danny Boyle recently said on this point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k
I know this will be a controversial statement, as I get into this argument with my friends who are game design majors on a regular basis, but I do not believe that video games will supplant film as the highest form of narrative storytelling. The industry is relatively young and as such most likely won't create its own Citizen Kane for quite some time. I think far more likely is that a reinvigorated hollywood will become far more intertwined. Looking to Microsoft and Spielberg's recent collaborations I think is telling of where these trends will head with narrative filmmaking supplementing and expanding upon franchises, and video games working more closely with Hollywood to infuse their games with the level of storytelling audiences have grown to expect from their entertainment.
Well it was horrifying enough. I guess it's a small step to be terrified of another Transformers movie ;P
The lone hero is reminiscent of the archetypical Kantian concept of Übermensch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch ).
Interesting article, but blockbuster posters come in a myriad of formats - I was actually expecting a "hero prominently at the center, sidekicks scattered around the background of the frame" kind of thing, much like that GI Joe: Retaliation movie (cf links). I just checked a few on the top of my head, and the only one that follows the painting style is I Am Legend for obvious reasons.
Armageddon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232500/
Fast and Furious: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232500/
Avatar: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/
Transformers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/
GI Joe: Retaliation: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1583421/
I Am Legend: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
Abrams didn't do the Transformers movies...
My 2c. I have a 3D TV and I buy 3D blu-rays. Its the only reason I buy blu-rays now. Otherwise I buy online on Amazon or iTunes. We don't go to the movies ever. I do, however, enjoy the kind of silly, action movies, such as Transformers, that many of my clever friends turn the noses at. Not coincidentally these friends don't see the value that 3D adds to a movie. "The Piano", or "Withnail and I" probably wont ever benefit from 3D treatment. OTOH, action movies like Transformers, and gag movies like Despicable Me, are ideal for 3D and we now have about 10 glasses in our house for like minded friends and sleep-overs. I sincerely hope that there are enough of us to keep the 3D market going.
This should go at the top. I was really annoyed to read this.
His career as a producer seems fairly limited, but it's worth considering that Steven Spielberg was a producer on Transformers.
I didn't see much of a Spielberg touch on that movie.
That said, I did not entirely agree with them :)
I agree that Kickstarter is unlikely to raise 300 million dollars for the next Hobbit trilogy. I disagree that a huge blockbuster will never be crowdfunded. Transformers, Harry Potter, and Avatar all cost less than 300 million dollars. 30 million people pre-paying 10 dollars is not ridiculous, when you look at how many people use Google, and how many users Facebook claims to have.
Surprisingly, movie studios don't necessarily fund the projects that they profit from. Since you mentioned LotR universe:
"New Line made enough pre-sales in foreign markets, and there were enough subsidies to pretty much cover their costs. New Zealand was not the only subsidy. There was also the British Commonwealth subsidy and the German tax subsidy in those days. New Line didn't have to put up any cash to make that movie."
Also movie studios consistently claim to not make profits from their movies.
"However, New Line later produced accounts showing that instead of making a profit, the movies made "horrendous losses". According to Hubbard: "We found it surprising because it was one of the biggest box office success of all time.""
Other funding options: a company could start making short films and then transition into making larger, more expensive ones once it gains the trust of its audience. The films could be broken into "episodes" to reduce the amount of money that each chunk would cost. This all ignores patronage, another alternative funding mode.
Lastly, most movies aren't blockbusters. Even if everything I just said is a lie, the vast majority of movies will be just fine, because their budgets are laughably small. District 9 was shot for 30 million dollars. Primer was shot for 7000 dollars. When Harry Met Sally cost 16 million dollars. Citizen Kane cost 15 million. Pretty Woman cost 14 million. The government funded BBC has produced such things like The Office, Monty Python, and Billy Elliot on less than 5 million each.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10693123
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
It is a cultural, subconscious effect. Higher frame rate content is associated with either real life (sports, news) or bad TV (soaps).
I don't think the content association is the problem. The problem is that most people watch movies to escape from real life. It could be that higher frame rate is used for action movies e.g. Transformers and lower frame rate for dramas but I don't know how that would work.
Oh and any argument about "getting used to it" can be shot down with 3D. The world has had plenty of time to adjust and overwhelmingly still hate it.
Those people you name are all artists who make their living performing. "Professional" for them has a different meaning. But they still can't say anything they want without censure. Look at how much crap Kanye West took for "Imma let you finish", for example. You will very rarely find them talking trash about people they've worked with, and when it does it often has consequences. Megan Fox, for example, got fired from the Transformers movie because she said some unprofessional things about the director. Her co-star said, "Criticism is one thing. Then there's public name-calling, which turns into high-school bashing. Which you can't do."
More importantly, they're not executives or leaders. Dan Porter is in charge of hundreds of people. How he treats the people who work for him isn't some minor thing; it's the essence of management. His tweet made him look like a petty asshole, and his non-apology confirms that for me.
I'll take a thirty second stab at it - piracy is unsustainable. It costs money to create music, movies and games - movies like Transformers, and video games like Portal are unlikely to be created without a significant amount of funding. While piracy doesn't directly take money away from the creators, it can potentially subtract from their income.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/
Kind of reminds me of the intense blue/orange colorizing so many movies and TV shows get these days (Transformers and Fringe are two notorious examples).
Post production cost may be cheaper, but then you have to deal with distribution , marketing, PR, salaries for your cast ($20M per picture for a big movie star), crew, script, Etc.
And then you have to convince millions of moviegoers NOT to watch high budget competition such as Dark Knight Rising, Transformers, Twilight, Spiderman, etc.
Then you need to have something Millions of people want to watch this is the hard part :)
And then you'll kill Hollywood.
You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.
Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.
Then, you'll kill Hollywood.
You pretty much nailed it. YC don't understand entertainment, just like the entertainment industry refuse to understand web technology. Transformers is really an edge case, many hollywood films can be made for half of that[1]. Not your typical YC type of investment, but still doable by tech industry, after all we have tech startups like color getting 40 million for an app. The question is will the Tech industry be willing to make investment in an industry it really does not understand. Contrary to some misconception being a great entertainer does require some kind of discipline and experience like being hacker. It takes time, many entertainers start young and spend many hours working on their craft, just like hackers. The stereotypical drugs and alcohol abuse come after. Hollywood type talent is not something you can just whip up. An interesting note, Mark Susters is a tech VC investing in entertainment[2] to disrupt the market. But Mark is working on the low end of the scale, with very low budget productions (compared to hollywood) and average actors and directors. This too is not enough. If YC is seriously going to attempt to kill Hollywood it's going to have to take on risk it never did before. The entertainment crowd is much different from the tech crowd.
[1] The average cost as of 2008 is 106.6 million http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/06/business/fi-boxoffice6 in 2009 MPAA, the organization compiling and reporting the figures stopped. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/03/mpaa.html
[2] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/11/03/the-future-of-television-presentation/ In his presentation Mark Suster made some correct but to obvious observation, what I disagree is his take on talent, namely he thinks the cost of talent is going up. He's not completely wrong, in that the cost of mediocre talent has gone done, but talent that people want to see, the talent that can sell tickets and drive views, their pay is going up.
There's also a huge demand for flights to the moon. Nobody supplies it because it'd be too expensive. Same thing for a LOTR that you couldn't charge for.
Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.
I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?
I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.
I think a problem with "rewatchability" is that it can vary drastically with the amount of viewings. I'm going to substitute Aliens for Transformers, because "watchable" is not a word I would use to describe Transformers.
Aliens is very rewatchable. It has tense but predictable action (the aliens kill everyone, "get away from her", etc.). Sure, it's best the first time, but Aliens only ceases to be rewatchable when you get tired of watching Aliens.
Films like Primer, Fight Club, and The Usual Suspects, are very rewatchable once, with a sharp decline afterwards. The Soze/Durden effect is incredible once. The next time, you want to watch very closely to catch all of the obvious hints that you missed. You might still miss some, but not many. By the fourth time, it's almost pointless.
>With top-notch video camears as low as $2-3K now, I'm forever expecting a DIY movie explosion, which never happens. People explain this as "it' difficult to shoot,edit, etc. a movie" which is true but I think the much bigger factor is the stronghold these companies have on distribution.
I agree with you to an extent. You can always find young, talented actors who are willing to do a film but the main problem is the script and finding a talented director who hasn't been signed by a major studio.
Another factor are the viewers themselves. They have been so conditioned to expect that only a major studio picture is worth watching (similar to the music industry) that they're not willing to give anything else a chance. How else do you explain the success of Transformers or the moderate success of the Green Lantern when most people have heard of neither unless you were a comic book fan or grew up on 80s cartoons?
Well looking at Hollywood the mega-producers tend to gravitate to big films that are focused on box office rather than creating a great film. The producer has more insecurity than a writer/director so creativity is substituted for short cuts like a well known license or a big star in a safe film. The result is a film like Transformers -- cool eye candy, makes real money yet it's an average film.
I prefer a VC model where Weinstein brothers find a Tarantino and make a film that not only makes money but can be watched with admiration for years to come. This isn't to say that Hollywood producers in days of old weren't talented, but these days you get bland product.
The same thing will happen with tech. A VC as producer may be good at identifying a unique niche that needs a product (say medical billing software) but you won't get a gem like a Flickr or Facebook that way. And that's not to say that the producer model is wrong, but it's not as much fun.
Oh come on, the movie wasn't that terrible. I saw it yesterday morning in a completely sold out theater (every showing has been sold out so far, with a line around the theater of people trying to get in).
My "exit polls" (overhearing people talk about it as we all shuffle out) indicate that most people enjoyed it.
Sure it wasn't transformers, it was slow (but somehow not slow enough), and not very nuanced (the dialog the article is talking about), but it was an alright way to spend 105 minutes.
If you're a fan of film, I think you should go see it, if for no reason other than to try and see how the producers are trying to translate the story to film. It's also pretty culturally significant.
Hopefully with enough interest (and money) the second one will be done properly.
If ST:N was the most heavy-handed you've seen, then I guess you haven't seen Transformers. Or any blockbuster action movie made in the last 5 years.
http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html
Edit: I'm slow, this was linked in the comments below.
I think that, these days, we can take special effects for granted - every movie will have them and they will be mostly great - and undetectable. It takes an expert to be impressed by Avatar and how sunlight filters through foliage and skin. As special effects approach reality, it takes a trained eye will be able to differentiate the great from the groundbreaking.
Maybe compelling story is the key factor here. I don't believe kids went to see Transformers for the effects - all they wanted was to be entertained.
Neither Michael Bay nor Sigourney Weaver have much involvement with special effects.
And, actually, what convinced me to see Avatar were the special effects. And there wouldn't be enough special effects in the world to convince me to go to a movie theater to watch Transformers.
This dude is ranting about the wrong thing. There are parts of Avatar and Transformers, etc, that look like you're running a game on an overloaded computer.
The problem here isn't televisions running at a high rate. The problem is film adhering to the bleeding edge of what was possible 100 years ago. 24fps is not adequate to handle lots of motion.
(feel free to downvote at will ...)
my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!"
james cameron was the guy who brought us the Terminator movies, True Lies, and a few other great heart-pounding action movies of the 80's and 90's (Titanic was an outlier for him ... it was far different than any other movie he had done). nobody was over-analyzing the geo-political realism or marital relations in True Lies.
the man is an action filmmaker. his movies should be compared to other big-budget Hollywood action films (e.g., transformers, bourne movies), not to deeply profound works of sci-fi/fantasy art like LOTR, Neal Stephenson novels, etc.
Although the article mentions the topic, it has such a broad sweep that it obscures the real takeaway, which is the way that 3d is employed. All the stuff about the incredibly detailed CG, backstory etc. is valid and interesting, but epic levels of such are not really new - Star Wars has a very detailed alternative universe, and any Tolkien nerd above a certain age can remember the vast level of supplementary data on Middle Earth that existed before the movies (Tolkien was a philologist by profession so he had fully developed multiple languages etc. to invest his imaginary world with a sense of realism).
The real kicker (from studio and filmmaker's point of view) is how Cameron is employing 3d. On most films until now it's been a novelty, used to make a weapon or explosion seem to imperil the audience, or to abuse perspective for comic effect. Cameron's achievement is to integrate it tightly with the existing cinematic language of the lens.
Basically lenses can be 'wide' or (confusingly) 'long'. A wide-angle lens presents a wide field of view while exaggerating perspective, while a long lens isolates small detail and can reduce the sense depth. Obviously this is important for framing, but it can be used in other ways; if you wish to increase tension, shoot someone running towards the camera with a long lens. S/he will hardly seem to be moving forward at all, and as viewers we fear the character will be unable to reach their objective in time. Conversely, the same motion when shot with a wide lens will suggest rapid movement from background to foreground, giving us a sense of power an inevitability (or conversely, of weakness and impotence if a character is falling away from the camera). Obviously I'm just scratching the surface here, but the various distortions of perspective possible with different focal lengths are a big part of what gives cinema its dramatic power.
What Cameron has been doing with Avatar is to shoot in deep focus (no using the aperture and focus controls to blur out the background, a favorite technique for isolating the subject from the environment) but instead create depth by altering the angle between the two lenses dynamically, creating the illusion of a large space in which attention to depth is focused stereoscopically. Until now most 3d projects have kept the stereoscopic distance fixed, which yields the feeling of watching the story take place on a stage in front of one and occasionally having one of the props or actors protrude outwards toward the audience. By varying the angle between the lenses in the same fashion as our eyes, Cameron presents a far more immersive way of experiencing the third dimension.
Much of the skepticism towards Avatar trailers and so forth stems from the fact that the background is often fully in focus - a technique which has been used to great cinematic effect (eg in Citizen Kane) but which has fallen out of fashion over the years. In videogames, by contrast, such deep focus is common (since you don't know where the player will want to focus attention in advance, and also because simulating narrow depth of field dynamically is computationally expensive). This deep focus is necessary to provide a credible sense of depth with variable-angle stereoscopy (if we threw the background out of focus too much, the foreground characters would just seem to be floating in space), but when you see it projected in regular 2d it looks old-fashioned and videogame-y.
It's not the CG that looks weird; if you shot an ordinary scene with the same 3d technique it would look boring and flat in 2d (indeed, the difficulty of emphasizing depth by adjusting focus on a consumer video camera is a big part of what makes it 'look like video'). So the primary reason Avatar is a Big Deal for Hollywood is that Cameron seems to have succeeded in developing a 3d photographic technique that is much more compelling and realistic than the standard fixed-angle 3d which has been used until now, which actually emphasizes the separation of the audience from the action. And in order to fully appreciate this...yes, you'll need to go to the theater.
Cameron has also done other amazing things - being able to integrate the CG with the live action at production time (instead of imagining it and then integrating the two image sources over months or years of post-production work) is also a very big deal, but that's much more 'inside baseball' as the main beneficiaries are the filmmakers rather than the audience, although it will lead to better results insofar as it will make it easier for less skilled or funded production teams to produce convincing blends of real and artificial images. And there are a host of other technical innovations - there will be multiple books written for the professional market on how to improve a film by employing Cameron's techniques; indeed, I dearly wish Cameron himself would write a book (or several) on his approach to directing, since he is the master of staging and editing complex visual action - if you need proof of this, watch a long action sequence from Terminator 2 (or any of his other films actually) and then a similar action scene from Michael Bay or someone similar; he too has access to huge budgets and armies of technical professionals, but in films like Transformers audiences can literally lose track of what's going on, who's winning a battle etc.
But the bottom line is that Avatar will live (or die, but probably live) by virtue of the way Cameron leverages 3d to put the audience 'in' the visual story, which is a fundamentally different photographic technique from that employed up to now.
Well, that is why I watch Vimeo.Low-budget and good. And in general, that is very American way of thinking, that the best movies necessarily have to use most advanced technologies. For example, European movies are often low-budget, yet better than Transformers or Twilight, or similar stuff.
This is true of a lot of trades.
Music and writing. Do not let people in on your work, unless they're privy and trusted.
It is hard for average people get excited about your intentions, if it isn't presented properly.
In fact, it is all about presentation. Look at the average response to the awesome explosions in Transformers. It would take more words to describe the functions of Notepad than to describe what is going on in the too long eye-candy scenes of that movie.
Hell, look at the bible. Why do we need long parables to describe simple ideas?
From This is the Dreamtime blog post by Robin Hanson (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html):
We were built to be influenced by the rhetoric, eloquence, difficulty, drama, and repetition of arguments, not just their logic. Perhaps this once helped us to ally us with high status folks. And we were built to show our ideals via the stories we like, and also to like well-crafted stories. But today we are exposed to arguments and stories by folks far more expert than found in ancestral tribes. Since we are built to be quite awed and persuaded by such displays, our beliefs and ideals are highly influenced by our writers and story-tellers. And these folks in turn tell us what we want to hear, or what their patrons want us to hear, neither of which need have much to do with reality.
This article gives me the same feeling of when I watch movies with a horrible scientific plot (eg The Transformers). It's entertaining, but so off the mark.
I guess writing about the Multilayer Perceptron, Support/Relevance Vector Machines, and Markov Models isn't as sexy and probably wouldn't sell well...
Then again, I guess what they ARE writing doesn't sell well either...
At least it promises to be better than Transformers. That movie was like watching a large, HIV positive felon rape my childhood in the jailhouse shower.
Fight Club helps keep us grounded in a sense. As for Léon, it is an amazing film to be sure. Transformers I first saw on DVD after it had been released. Maybe it was due in part to my circumstances at the time, but it was somehow a profoundly surreal experience.
Yeah sorry about the lack of paragraphs. I always get this nagging feeling that I need to add empty rows for.. clarity :)
You watch Fight Club several times per week?! I can't understand the motivation, but hey, people are different!
I've seen Fight Club exactly once, in a theatre, but there are movies I've seen many times, and will watch again. One such movie is Leon ("The Professional"). In case you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour.. It has to be the director's cut though.
> Finally, I think at this stage piracy (well, quality piracy at least) is still something that Joe Public isn't savvy enough to pick up.
Maybe, but many Joe Publics are already downloading movies much like you and I, and at least see some of the good stuff in there while looking for Saw XVII.
They might download quality entertainment by accident. Of course, they might just as well stop watching it too, when quality fails to keep their attention.
Anyways, Transformers was legendary for me too, and the movie was enjoyable, with some of the coolest 3D ever. I feared Michael Bay would just totally ruin it.
You bring up some good points (although a couple actual paragraphs would have been easier to read ;), but I have to personally disagree on the replay value of good movies. I own many movies that I have watched countless times; I recently had to buy Fight Club again because we watch it a few times a week and the DVD was just worn out. There are numerous other amazing films that I can't get enough of as well. I have no idea how many times I've watched The Shawshank Redemption, as another example. I own movies like Transformers not because they're perfect filmmaking, but because I like to relive my younger years sometimes.
In general I agree that music has far greater replay value. I think that's partially because it's something that can be enjoyed basically any time, anywhere. I can't think of the last time I worked in silence for more than a few minutes at a time. That being said, I do my best to "pay tribute" to quality media by purchasing it. I'm sure I own quite a few movies I haven't seen in years, but I bought them because they struck me as worth paying for.
Finally, I think at this stage piracy (well, quality piracy at least) is still something that Joe Public isn't savvy enough to pick up. By the time the people who pay to consume all the horrible media out there (like, 90% of the total), I would hope a sane and intelligent response to the piracy issue will have found its way to "Big Entertainment."
The FMG-9's been all over the gunnie blogs lately. As LawDog put it: "Now, that's just flat neater than kitten toes." (http://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/2008/03/want.html)
Admittedly, it's just a concept gun and, even if it weren't, entirely unlikely to survive the political and technical trials of getting to market. But still, how friggin' cool is that?
It's amazing what people can do with a glock, some ingenuity, and one too many screenings of the transformers movie.
Best visual effects: The Golden Compass
Also nominated: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Transformers
I saw all three of those movies, and even though GC was supremely craptastic, its effect were beautiful. I loved Transformers and I still think GC had better visual effects.