"Ugh. This again?" -- You
Hollywood loves to repeat itself, because if something worked once as a fluke it can certainly work again and again. Like I always say: if it ain't broke, "fix it" until it is.
So what one trend are you all ready to see go? 3-D? Reboots? Movies that star Cam Gigandet?
Post-action. That shaky-cam, confusing, quick-cut mess that passes for an action sequence in seemingly every movie lately. Filmmakers need a better understanding of the fact that movement does not equal action.
ReplyDeleteA million times, yes! Get rid of shake-cam.
DeleteOne of the reasons I think that the fight sequences looked so great in "The Winter Soldier" were the choreography and the wide camera shots during the fights.
+1
DeleteAlthough the effect is used to create a heightened reality, it just makes me more aware of the staged production.
3-D all the way. I rarely feel like it adds much to a movie, and it just feels like a means to jack up ticket prices. I went to Avatar in 3-D and haven't been back to a movie in 3-D since.
ReplyDeleteStop it already.
But I like 3D, a lot. What about me? Sob, sob. :'(
DeleteWell, I should also say at least they don't force us to go to one or the other, giving the option to see the movies in whichever way we please. If they're going to do 3-D, I suppose that's the way to go.
DeleteMore related to criticism...you have to say why you feel a movie is "powerful" "amazing" "great" etc. I hate hyperbole because it is rare that we get a personal explanation from the critic/fan as to why they feel the way they do. That's the interesting part.
ReplyDelete1: When the hero learns he/she is the "chosen one," or some variation thereupon.
ReplyDelete2: In horror, evil disfigured hillbillies as the villains.
3: Referring to stuff from the late '90s as "retro."
Genre movies that try to be ironically bad.
ReplyDeleteI'll second this.
DeleteThird. I liked Black Dynamite a lot and Lost Skeleton of Cadavra a little, so I think it can be artfully done, but Syfy channel Sharknado-nonsense needs to go.
DeleteFourth. Fuck you, Sharknado.
DeleteUnless they come with a more gripping and absolutely no-other-way-this-can-work plot, I am sick of movies (reality or fantasy, action or sci-fi, live action or animated, super hero or just plain zero... zoinks!) in which the good guys and the bad guys have to team-up and work together against a common folk too powerful to be taken down by one side alone. I'm both so thrilled and so anxious that "X-Men: Days of Winter Past" might be able to pull off the time travel and united opposition plots together, but just the fact the mutant factions are teaming-up (didn't this happen already on a previous "X-Men" movie?) annoys me as something I've seen too many times already. So lazy, like the killing of a girl that survives a horror movie in the sequel to artificially raise the stakes! Enough with the good guys teaming up with the bad guys, please!
ReplyDeleteGratuitous CGI/animation, especially if it makes a live action movie look like a video game.
ReplyDeleteFight sequences that are more like dance routines. The characters should look like they are actually fighting.
Lazy writing. With millions of dollars on the line, spend some more time and/or a few hundred grand to improve the script.
Meta references that aren't meaningful on their own. Referring to something funny is not the same as being funny.
3D.
ReplyDeleteI don't even mind found footage to be honest. But 3D is rubbish more often than not and its gotstago
JJ Abrams.
ReplyDeleteAKA, "lens flares".
Two words - Found Footage. Ugh...I'm so tired of it.
ReplyDeleteWell Vargas, I guess it's a lonely life for us 3D lovers, though I suppose the format does give the people who hate it plenty of reasons to.
ReplyDeleteI hate to be the hippy-dippy give peace a chance kinda guy but I'm not sure there's anything trend out there that doesn't still at least have the potential of being done well. Even "found footage" - I start thinking I've had enough and then something like The Dirties comes along (hell, I'm into the new Ft13th movie being found footage as rumoured).
Another would be American/English-language remakes of great foreign films - on the face of it it's like fuck off you subtitle-hating bastards, but then a movie like Let Me In ends up being good enough that at a given moment I could conceivably be more in the mood for it than the original.
I guess if making movies that do not speak to my heart, mind or even just my damn eyes can be considered a trend, then yeah, Hollywood, stop that.
A week ago I might have said found footage, but then The Dirties and The Sacrament showed me that there's still ways for skilled filmmakers to make it seem fresh, or at least not use it as a crutch and little else.
DeleteYeah. I don't hate found footage either. I think it can be an effective way of making guerilla film making more visually acceptable and also really good at hiding holes in special effects budget limitations.
DeleteOh and on that note I also don't have s problem with cgi.
Yep, Sol, is lonely being the guy that likes 3D, especially around the 'F This Movie' community. On the other hand my family in AZ loves 3D too, so we're constantly mailing our 3D movies back and forth to share the 3D joy. And, for the few friends in my circle that like 3D, being the only guy that actually owns a 3D TV makes me very popular. Later this month we're having a 3D movie night so we watch "Gravity" the way it's meant to be seen: on a 58" in passive 3D. Still haven't decided what else we're watching after (it's a toss-up between "Dredd 3D" or "John Carter 3D," or we might go a completely different route) except that it has to be 3D. :-)
DeleteAs far as the found footage genre, I've deliberately haven't gone overboard watching it so it still can startle and work for me, but I can clearly see the limits. Then again, a friend of mine has seen all found footage movies and he can't get enough of them. He just turned me into The Vicious Brothers' "Grave Encounters" movies, which are as found footage as movies come and are decent horror flicks. To each his own I guess.
(Off to see "Amazing Spider-Man 2" at a 3D matinee in Chelsea)
I actually don't mind 3D as long as I have normal 2D sessions to also choose from. Far too many times, the "prime time" movie session, or the movie marathon or the session on the biggest screen is in 3D. There's nothing wrong with 2D dammit!
DeleteAlthough, I've had some pretty cool 3D experiences: Prometheus, Avatar and Gravity made 3D worthwhile.
Reboots.
ReplyDeleteFranchise filmmaking. I hate it that we're getting release dates for movies that aren't coming out until 2025.
ReplyDeleteThe studio and filmmakers spend more time setting up a possible movie universe than concentrating on making the best film possible now. Actions like this may kill film series before they even get to their future destinations.
DeleteYou wouldn't be referring to any specific movie that opened this weekend, would you?
DeleteI believe that we are...
DeleteWhile 3d and shakycam are up there for me my personal fad I want to see disappear is studios believing they need to show us the DARK version of a remake or comic book movie. While Captain America 2 is a good step away from this I really hope studios can figure out that their is a nice medium between Batman sliding down a dinosaur Flintstones style and Superman snapping a guys neck, at least those are my thoughts on that.
ReplyDeleteFake death scenes (it was a hologram that was shot!)
ReplyDeletePG-13 remakes of R-rated movies
Director's cuts that weren't made by the directors, but by the film distributors
3-D post-conversion
The overwhelming phenomenon in horror films in recent years of the villain, killer, ghost, demon, etc. winning in the end. At this point, any time I see a new trailer for a scary film I take for granted that in the end, the film is going to make it seem like one or two protagonists survive the ordeal, only to have the bad guy show up one last time to kill them or possess one of them, or screw things up somehow. I'm fine with not always having the protagonist win, but this "twist" is used so often in scary movies that it's lost all it's value. There have to be better, more clever story resolutions out there than the cynical "Ha ha, everyone dies. We got ya. Everything sucks." This trend really needs to go.
ReplyDeleteI'll give a shout-out to the massive under-representation of women. Granted, in many of the action-centric/comics-derives movies I'm most likely to see, this can be hard to avoid, so I admit I'm part of the problem, in ticket sales terms, but one thing that's been so impressive about Arrow is that this season, there are five female lead characters as well as two major supporting females. And while most all their plots do tend to revolve around men in general and Oliver Queen in particular, they've all been as well-written and complex as the guys. In the same vein, on the one hand, I think these sudden calls for gender parity in the new Star Wars movies are pretty silly - it's Star Wars, for Pete's sake; what do you expect? - but on the other hand, I'd love to see them realized.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I could do without: PG-13 Bonds. 007 can shower up a woman who's been a sex slave since childhood, and that's all good, but we can't see any nudity, because that would be inappropriate? Lame. :P
Do I need to be watching Arrow?
DeleteIf you enjoy comic book stuff/superheroes on film, then yes, absolutely. While it starts off a bit slow (not ever bad, mind, just a touch slow), it very confidently and gradually builds up its universe and characters to the point where the span from the last third of the first season to the entirety of this second one has been a thundering locomotive of a ride, with incredible tension, narrative speed, and heavy serialization.
DeleteI read your review of Enterprise's third season. While I agree there were some strong episodes in there, overall I wasn't impressed as you were, particular since it's obvious even on the first viewing that the writers were making stuff up on the fly with little forward planning. (Remember that episode with the hot blonde blackmailed by the baddies to scan the crew's bodies? Because none of the writers ever did after that ep had aired. Or the planet of the cowboys, a pretty good outing? Also totally forgotten. And couldn't any of the E² crew members have joined our gang for good? Ha!) With Arrow, even the few and increasingly rare one-off villains really serve to develop the characters, and they often come back, or at least are referenced.
In short, think of Arrow as a much more consistent and better-written, Nolan-influenced (albeit much more interested in its women) masked vigilante epic with an emotional heft and narrative scale that puts ENT's third season to shame, and you'll have a decent idea of what you're in for. :)
Yes El! I mean even when we are represented it is likely that is going to come with a whole bunch of problems. Some of the things on my list are related to the representation of women.
Delete1) The trope in children's movies where there is an unhealthily overprotective father to a daughter approaching her teens. It leads to many of these films having the same beats and I think a lack of originality. Three Examples: Hotel Transylvania, The Croods and Ice age 4. You don't see this with father and sons in movies. Only fathers and daughters. You know because daughters need protecting and always come attached with father's who will punch any man within a 5 mile radius of them. Mostly I think I am supposed to connect with this but that I cannot relate to it at all and I don't think my father does either.
2) A female character having to be saved by the male character at some point in the film, when it is set up that she can really look after herself. Even How to train your dragon did it, which is a film I really like.
Other things on my list:
3) Gayness being a joke, or a punch line. Representation of LGBT on the most part isn't particularly great. I try keep up to date as to how we are being represented and well I just wish there was more of it and certainly more positive representation. Please stop with the vampire/psychopaths stereotype Hollywood.
4) Mental illness being on screen with a huge display of ignorance from the film-maker as to the illness they are taking about. Please do some research, please. I am not saying this is true for all films that depict mental illness but there have been many occasions when this has happened. I can branch this out to all disabilities.
I've only seen season one of Arrow. It's good, pulpy stuff.
DeleteFor me, it's the vanishing middle-class of original movies aimed for adults, made on a moderate budget, without the need to hit demographics or be "high concept". Modern American cinema so often only presents you with the choice of junk food or Haute cuisine, and sometimes all you need is a really good chicken soup.
ReplyDeleteYes! I didn't even love something like Draft Day but was so willing to accept it because it fell into this category.
DeleteWhat a great post, Jeremy. I agree.
DeleteShitty paranormal themed horror movies that rely solely on "cheap thrills." Maybe it's because I don't find the paranormal to be very scary or interesting or maybe it's because it is completely over done. Either way, I would have no problem if I never saw another trailer for a movie about a haunted house with a twisted past or ghosts being recorded on webcams.
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit more prevalent than a trend--but I'd love to see more movies with just ONE screenwriter. These rewrites are just killing movies today. Rewrites are a part of the process I get it, but let the first guy do it...don't pass it person to person until the only thing that made it interesting is drained out of it. Imagine if novels were written this way...
ReplyDeleteFilm fans and bloggers (no one on this site) who say or write: "I love me some _________ (insert actor/actress)."
ReplyDeleteNo, no, no.