I’ve never thought that you are crazy. Mass-market entertainment is about making money, not art. You mention The Lord of the Rings. When I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, extended edition, I thought, “The people who made this did it out of love. There is MUCH more effort and detail put into this than was needed to make money.” In contrast, the Hobbit bloatfest, churned out by the same folks, had none of TLOTR’s charm and love. Hobbit was a cynical cash-grab, and this leads to another point. Movies, especially EVENT movies (fantasy, sci-fi, comic books, video games) have been formulated. Look at The Hobbit again: rapid-fire CGI, pointless action and bombast, characters and story elements pulled out of thin air and not from the mind of J.R.R Tolkien. Everything moves so fast that only really, really smart peoples will notice that most of it doesn’t make actual sense. And then end it all with a TWIST. The Hobbit eschewed that trope, but only because most people know how the book ends, and they couldn’t risk changing the ending. Twists have become expected by young audiences, and they feel a story without a twist is just WRONG. Last year, on the Big Little Lies boards, one poster complained about the resolution of the murder mystery. He lamented that it can’t end this was, because it wasn’t a TWIST. No, It wasn’t; instead, it was an exceptionally well-crafted, written and acted compelling drama that, not for nothing, won five Emmies. These days, I actually find better and more daring entertainment on premium cable than I do in movies. I think the modern big mass-market movie is the visual and aural equivalent of putting the whole audience on a drip that is a combination of equal parts pure sugar and pure morphine for the length of the film.
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Wint3rFir3 (6923)
6 years ago
Everyone must be a genius then because most people, even people who enjoyed the Hobbit films, realized it didn't make sense. But these same people will be like 'Jurassic World is the best Jurassic Park movie made!' Is it?
Your point about there being a twist in things is interesting. When I watched A Wrinkle in Time earlier this year, I felt like it was missing something like a twist as well. But not exactly. Just like the Hobbit films, the movie keeps up a rapid pace for the most part, but nothing is really happening. And in the end, nothing feels resolved. If there are any twists in the film, they don't feel like twists because there are no stakes. And so imho it's not a twist that's missing, but value. Same as the Hobbit films. The twist hasn't been earned so it has no value.
It's really weird because when it comes to book-to-film adaptations, aren't the arguments mostly about how little the film resembled the book? Yet this keeps happening - so if it's about money, why aren't filmmakers trying to make as much of it as possible by ruling out commonplace mistakes such as these?
And as I've said before, TV is where all the creativity is at - but at the moment, I feel like that's on the cusp of changing because TV is becoming so...monetized? Not that it wasn't before, but almost everyone has Netflix or something like it now. I don't even remember the last time I watched 'normal' tv.
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