Another failed and stressed professional goes home or someplace to find herself and discovers that life is really OK.
I am wondering if anyone outside of yuppiedom can relate to these films anymore?
Yipster (the new Hipster/Yuppie hybrid) film.
THAT'S IT! I have been trying to put my finger on what is wrong with comedy films these days but I couldn't see it until now. Comedies with Jason Bateman and Bradley Cooper are boring.
shareA lot of these films rarely deal with real loss too. It's usually just that they're been humbled in life and they're trying to cope with the fact that the world doesn't revolve around them.
These are clearly films made by yuppies, for yuppies (or yipsters). The makers of these films try to explain that their films or TV shows that showcase these people are relatable but in what way other than that they feel sad and so do you sometimes? It's what the problems are that matter and most people do not whine about not being able to break into the NY Playwriting scene.
What about loss of a loved one who could'nt afford an expensive medical treatment because of a lack of insurance or someone who lost his blue collar job and has to find new ways to fend for his family?
And please no comments about how I should start writing and make a movie if I am so vocal about it. That's such a cop out counter argument.
I don't really disagree with your main complaint, but I'll play devil's advocate.
When Africans or South Asians or Latin Americans think of Americans, what do you think they imagine? People who think the world revolves around them.
Do blue collar audiences want to see "blue collar films" or do they seek escape?
Why was the box office for Cinderella Man so underwhelming while it fared so well with (yuppie) critics? (and perhaps, yuppie audiences)
Writers tend to write what they know and a disproportionate number of screenwriters are yuppies. What do you propose to do about that? As a yuppie myself, I enjoy watching films about the poor and working class around the world, but there aren't that many to choose from, and even fewer if you're looking for a film that amuses and entertains.
I would also consider myself a yuppie only because I am a young urban upwardly mobile professional. Other than that I still retain my working class roots. I've noticed that the higher income I attain each passing year the more my tastes have changed but I think it has less to do with me entering another income bracket than me entering into a whole other class and the culture surrounding it. The higher I move up the more I notice some of the quirks, likes, tastes and behaviors of the upwardly mobile are a culture trait that differentiates them from the working class. Yuppies tend to think of it as a natural progression but it’s really just differences in class, nothing more. It’s a way for them to identify and differentiate themselves.
But because I grew up really working class and moved up into this new yuppie class, I still retain a sense of what Percy Windham Lewis calls “the vulgar streak”. It’s essentially retaining your working class background because you didn’t grow up in a upper middle class home and did not attend an Ivy but worked your way up and have yet to fully conform to the culture of a new income bracket. It’s no different than a yuppie that loses his job and has to find blue collar work and refuses to give in and subsist on a diet of chicken tenders.
I refuse to give myself over fully to yuppie and yipster films where the main problem lies in some unattainable wish to be admired by peers in some pretentious field. The sudden shock that they’re not the sole inhabitant of this planet sends them into a spiral of despondent angst. I mean I could feel sorry for one or two a year if these movies were rare birds, but they come in a gaggle. Not only at your local Cineplex but on TV too.
Now I think the problem is not one of supply and demand but of distribution and promotion. Working class people which number in the millions I don’t care how many Americans think of themselves as “middle class”, the vast majority are working class but are too arrogant to admit they’re not (and politicians play into this game about “saving the middle class”). Most would love to see a movie like John Sayles Matewan. If done right a big campaign with the right TV airtime and full distribution would’ve made that movie a big hit. The characters are extremely relatable; the message is more relevant now than it was at the time it was filmed (or the era which was portrayed).
But of course that would anger some of the major studios who are owned by major corporations with diversified interests. The lack of product placement wouldn’t interest high end backers to pay for marketing and the central issue of class warfare would anger the sentiments of the country’s elite. But that raises more questions about the extent of free speech in this country. A matter that is silenced by detractors who insist that your idea has to be “marketable”.
People want to see movies like Matewan, I know they do. Everyone I’ve shown the movie to who had no interest in unions or livable wage rights loved it. So I do not buy the whole argument that something has to be marketable to meet “demand”. That usually translates into is has to meet our (studio) standards.
I would also consider myself a yuppie only because I am a young urban upwardly mobile professional.
Other than that I still retain my working class roots
Yuppies tend to think of it as a natural progression but it’s really just differences in class, nothing more. It’s a way for them to identify and differentiate themselves.
It’s no different than a yuppie that loses his job and has to find blue collar work and refuses to give in and subsist on a diet of chicken tenders.
I refuse to give myself over fully to yuppie and yipster films where the main problem lies in some unattainable wish to be admired by peers in some pretentious field.
The sudden shock that they’re not the sole inhabitant of this planet sends them into a spiral of despondent angst
Most would love to see a movie like John Sayles Matewan. If done right a big campaign with the right TV airtime and full distribution would’ve made that movie a big hit
People want to see movies like Matewan, I know they do.
I believe the character in the film wanted to be a NYC playwright. I also think you're giving too much of a surface level explanation of the lower classes. That they're the way they are because of the way they are. The average working American is over-worked, under educated, under paid or mis-educated. They're not dumb boring lemmings that will just watch anything a studio puts out. They're not film connoisseurs either, they will go to the movies out of convenience and choose the latest thing out and many studio heads think they have a winning combo and giving the people what they want.
Intellectuals can like Matewan because it's a brilliant movie, I don't see why them liking it somehow negates what I am saying. Anyone of any class can see that the movie is absolutely stunning. The only people that wouldn't would be people who have an interest in not seeing a rise in union membership again or seeing any real interest in class awareness.
I see you're the type that sees culture as the problem rather than the issue being social/economic? Sayles makes his own films because studios would rather not invest in films for fear of them being unmarketable, but really they create the marketing itself so it's not like it wouldn't find an audience.
Sayles even talks about how studios will not invest in politically heavy films because of the politics itself not just because they're unmarketable. Listen to his interview with Amy Goodman in Democracy Now. There is a vested interest to not be too left wing or too populist in your films. You can be anti-greed, anti-corporate, anti-a few bad apples but to be actually anti-capitalist and have your protagonist be an IWW Red union man is something entirely different.
There are also examples of hits with a straight left wing bent like Malcolm X and Oliver Stone movies too. These films get made because they have the backing of someone who takes a gamble in them and they pay off. Same with Michael Moore.
REDS with Warren Beatty during the Reagan Era! Wow. That was amazing and a big hit. The list goes on. Point is you have to have incredible backing to get a movie like that off the ground and it has mostly to with politics not marketing.
The difference in studio treatment of Salt of the Earth vs On the Waterfront? Both came out at the same time but one was pro union and the other featured a corrupt union. Marlon Brando in Burn, probably one of the biggest anti-colonial films during a time of national liberation movement?
I could go on. I guess your under the impression that supply is meeting demand and Hollywood is giving dumb selfish hyper individualistic lemmings what they want?
It has a lot to do with marketing and that studios and marketing companies do not want to fund movies like this unless it makes them a boatload more money than Star Wars can, which they never will.
Why is culture your take on all this though? I am curious.
* I also want to add that I tend to not identify class as being an income based thing, but really what your position is in relation to your workplace. I am a "yuppie" I guess because I am young, have an above average income and live in a major city. But I still go to work, I still work for a salary/wage, I still have little input in the ownership/managerial side of the business I work for. I am much more a specialized craft worker in that I have more control over my skill than other workers who work service jobs. So I still identify with the worker/boss relationship dichotomy the working class relates to. The extra income puts me closer to the managers, bosses, and owners of industry and it lets me into their class 'culture' but their daily perils and routines are not the result of alienation like mine is, and they do lack (and thankfully so do I) the unnecessary trials and tribulations that come with income inequality and being the lowest rank in the workplace. You should know that the inequality seen in the workplace directly translates into social inequality outside the workplace between people. This is the difference between the two classes and the cultures that form as a result of this inequality.
I also think you're giving too much of a surface level explanation of the lower classes. That they're the way they are because of the way they are. The average working American is over-worked, under educated, under paid or mis-educated. They're not dumb boring lemmings that will just watch anything a studio puts out. They're not film connoisseurs either
Anyone of any class can see that the movie is absolutely stunning.
I see you're the type that sees culture as the problem rather than the issue being social/economic?
Sayles even talks about how studios will not invest in politically heavy films because of the politics itself not just because they're unmarketable.
There is a vested interest to not be too left wing or too populist in your films. You can be anti-greed, anti-corporate, anti-a few bad apples but to be actually anti-capitalist and have your protagonist be an IWW Red union man is something entirely different.
here are also examples of hits with a straight left wing bent like Malcolm X and Oliver Stone movies too. These films get made because they have the backing of someone who takes a gamble in them and they pay off. Same with Michael Moore.
REDS with Warren Beatty during the Reagan Era! Wow. That was amazing and a big hit.
point is you have to have incredible backing to get a movie like that off the ground and it has mostly to with politics not marketing.
I guess your under the impression that supply is meeting demand and Hollywood is giving dumb selfish hyper individualistic lemmings what they want?
Why is culture your take on all this though? I am curious.
Yet another example of commercial considerations, not personal prejudices, narrowing the scope of fiction, this time in a novel. The perpetrator? An ex-Communist, American publisher by the name of Don Wollheim.
http://www.philipkdick.com/media_sfeye87.html
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LUPOFF: But the major objection was that the hero was black, and he said, “Surveys indicate that most of our readers are white and that most black people don’t read books, or at least not science fiction. So nobody would want to buy this book, so I don’t want to publish it.”
I’m inclined to believe that these are less of Don’s personal prejudices and convictions than they are very calculated commercial considerations.
DICK: That could be, yeah.
LUPOFF: God knows he’d have no objection to a novel about Christianity dying out – not being a Christian. First of all, he’s Jewish by birth, and he’s a sort of radical atheist.
DICK: He was supposed to be a communist for a while.
LUPOFF: Oh, yes, he makes no pretense about it. In fact, I asked him about it for an article I was writing about social and political attitudes in science fiction for Ramparts. I asked him a few questions and he said that back in the late Thirties/early Forties when it was fashionable to be a communist, a bunch of science fiction fans – including himself – had a contact with some recruiters from the Communist Party USA. And the “real” communists wanted nothing to do with the science fiction fans because they thought that science fiction was too far divorced from immediate reality. It was utopian and fantastic and what these people should do is abandon science fiction and then they’d be acceptable as recruits for communism. But they didn’t want them as long as they were going to be science fiction fans.
DICK: Yeah, I remember an article in The People’s World after World War II in which science fiction was denounced as a reactionary tool of the Imperialist, Fascist powers. Then, as you know, the party switched its mind on science fiction and became pro science fiction. I think they changed over about the time of Sputnik.
There is always one of these on all movie's message boards, complaining that the problems in movies aren't *beep* traumatic enough or something. If you aren't interested in the content then don't watch it it's as easy as that.
shareI don't consider myself a yuppie but I can relate to the themes here. The messages I got out of the film is - if you end up with lemons, make lemonade; and the grass isn't always greener on the other side and even if it is, you can make your own side greener. This was a nice little late night film to watch before going to sleep.
~"Chris, am I weird?"
~"Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird."
No! All films must have a deep underlying political or social message that applies to everyone of every race, every gender, every age, every income bracket, etc! Whoever started this thread is an idiot, they knew the plot before watching and watched it anyway, so shut up. Or they didn't know the plot, and they're whining because of their own ignorance. Either way people like them need to go away...
"What? Do you wanna just sit around and be wrong?" - Liz Lemon
I think thismis true but a lot of people can easily interchange jobs and situations and relate it to theirmown lives.
shareI agree. And I would add shows like "Girls" and the whole mumble core genre (or whatever it's called). Kristin Wiig's character was just a whiny spoiled brat. And the film doesn't seem to acknowledge how disturbing it is for a grown woman to fake her suicide in order to hold on to her man. It's just touted as a lovable quirk, not manipulative tool.
Other than that, I thought it was interesting that all the women were older than their suitors.
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