Unless a movie is horribly dated with jargon and references, or wildly out of place social issues*, any good movie should still be good.
*even something that has something like racism or misogyny in it might still be worth watching if those issues can be framed as something that should be seen as how we used to do things and why we don’t do them like that anymore.
Damn…
Part of what makes the internet wonderful is being able to access movies from all eras. Why limit yourself to only new stuff?
As an aside, the OG Little Shop of Horrors still holds up IMO.
Right? I am constantly watching shit from before my parents were even born. Shits well done yo
That’s such a stupid take. The 90s and early 2000s were literally the golden age of feature movies. IMDB has 58 movies rated 8.5 or higher, 24 of those were released in the 15 years between 1990 and 2004. That’s about 41.4% and includes classics like Shawshank, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and of course the LotR trilogy.
Must suck not allowing yourself to enjoy anything from the past, and only allowing yourself to watch the slop they make today. There’s so many great old shows and movies to pick from.
It was the best of times,
It was the worst of times.
I was with you until you generalized contemporary movies. Great things were made back then and great things are made today. Same for shitty slop.
Sure, there’s definitely good stuff to be found today as well. I’m just disappointed with the current trend of making remake after remake and reboot after reboot. Original content doesn’t get the attention it deserves in comparison.
Red Dwarf!
Right? Imagine not liking fucking Glenn Miller or like Sinatra or basically any jazz. Or ffs, Star Wars.
It’s still hilarious to me that CGI peaked with pirates of the Caribbean.
Where’d sound mixing peak?
Up until the release of the iPod. That was the start of the era where record producers would compete to see who could be the loudest song on your MP3 player. Pushing compression to the extreme, squashing all dynamics down to a giant wall of sound that smacks you so hard in the face you get a headache from listening too long. (Look up “Loudness War”)
Things have improved since but it’s still not the same as back in the day, when we had to keep tunes dynamic in order to prevent the needle from flying off the record!
Ironically I have dynamic compression permanently cranked up to the maximum in VLC to avoid ‘whispers and explosions’.
I meant in film. Being able to hear what the fuck people are saying.
Definitely after THX was created and established standards for sound quality. Prior to that, most theaters had a single, tinny, mono speaker delivering all the audio. THX made multichannel audio + subwoofer the norm.
So sometime between then and the release of the DVD, which introduced multi-channel audio for the masses. Before then, most people had VHS players, which only supported up to 4 channel matrixed audio though a stereo RCA output. But stereo and surround on VHS was a later development, with early VHS tapes being stereo only. (There was also LaserDisc of course, which could support true 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, but as we all know it never caught on outside of the enthusiast and educational markets.)
That said, stereo on VHS was a later thing, so if we’re going to pinpoint the peak of audio mixing, I’m going to say it was the late 90s, when movies were mixed for stereo on VHS. Of course I’m only talking about the quality of the mix, and not other aspects of sound quality, which VHS is obviously inferior to digital in that aspect. Unless we’re talking about VHS Hi-Fi, which is a whole other debate I won’t get into here for brevity’s sake (cause this comment is already way too long as-is).
Regardless, you can still have a good movie-watching experience in the home, but you’re going to have to invest some money, simply because movies are mixed for surround sound, and not the average stereo TV speakers. While I’d recommend a minimum 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup for the best possible mix, you can get away with as little as a 3.0 setup. You’ll miss out on finer details in the mix, but the important part is having a dedicated center channel speaker so that you can independently adjust its volume and actually understand what people are saying.
Any decent home theater receiver or sound bar will also have a “dialog booster” adjustment, and/or an audio compression function to boost quiet scenes and make loud scenes quieter. It’s usually called “night mode”, “volume leveler”, or something like that. (Sometimes there’s multiple settings).
Edit: Spelling, punctuation; added bit about LaserDisc.
I live in a tiny apartment and usually watch on headphones. I don’t find sound to be a huge part to movies, I just hate needing subtitles in my first language to understand what people are saying. I will not spend extra money for hardware to view something (ripped from) a fucking 720p-capped Netflix stream because the people who make them don’t want to make a good product.
Well if you’re wearing headphones then the solution is simple. Install Equalizer APO and then a dialog booster VST plug in (there are many, don’t make me do the googling). Alternatively you could just boost the frequencies you struggle to hear the most to solve the issue.
So I should fo the mixing for every film?
I cannot believe these people want me to pay for media.
There’s a significant amount of detail lost in using gates and expanders in film. Drives me up the fucking wall that we still use hardware and software that’s not very good. I’d much rather hear some noise than transients and tail air. I stg.
Probably peaked on the tail of everything being overdubbed, but really high budget and high quality. (So probably late 90s and early 2000s?)
Don’t worry though, it’ll get better. The tools and techniques people use are always slowly getting better, and it’s a very passionate group.
my lord that’s depressing lol.
When people think something from 2014 is “old” i laugh in their face as I crank up my 1899 Edison victrola.
Even as a kid I never viewed something old unless it was 60+ years in the past.
I feel like movies haven’t changed much at all since around mid 90s. Like as long as current day fashion doesn’t appear in the movie, then i don’t see how a person would even be able to tell if a movie came out today vs. twenty years ago.
After Sept 11 films moved into the superhero fantasy land en masse, where good guys swoop in from the skies and save the US.
There’s actually quite a lot that’s changed in cinema since then. Since digital cameras and effects are incredibly common these days, we light everything very flatly so that it’s easier to change in post without reshoots. It makes lighting abysmally bad. (See wicked where the actress in vibrant green makeup looks a little grey the entire movie).
Pacing is also much faster, there’s more emphasis on not confusing audiences rather than letting things have mystery. Dialogue is more quippy rather than grounded.
Oh! And since there’s no more mid-budget movies, there’s a whole lot less comedies running around. Everything is either high budget, wall-to-wall action or grounded indie films with very little in-between.
Cellphones changed shape.
90s movies did not have ‘MillenialSpeak’ / ‘Marvel-isms’. They had cheesy one-liners. Which were better.
Club scenes are no longer filled with Goths, they’re filled with Jocks and Popular Girls.
Scores are generally much less unique and interesting these days.
More frantic pacing, contemplation is not allowed, outside of arthouse films.
That’s actually quite an interesting topic. Some good things in the comments, too.
I know a highschooler that won’t watch anything from before 2000, won’t watch lotr for other reasons like broken attention span.
A marathon of the extended editions is exactly what they need. Phone locked away during viewing.
Did this with my 16yo a couple months back. She was sick last week and marathoned them again on her own.
I was so proud
It’s honestly one of my favourite marathons to do on a cold winter weekend, excited for my annual viewing :)
Yeah, back in uni I used to do one with my friends at least once a year. We’d get about 10 people crammed into a room with a monitor, bring an unhealthy amount of snacks, plan to start at 9am, have tech issues till 11 or 12, and then watch until midnight or 1am with a break for pizza in the evening. It was great.
That does sound great, may be time for a sleepover viewing with the friends methinks, with some pipe weed
The fact that we’ve gotten to the point where looking at little screen is bad so we need to lock it up to stare at big screen, is depressing.
And I love movies, but the thought of that as a society is depressing.
But, it’s all good FreeVee isn’t it?
I own exactly one Blu-ray set, and got my Xbox series X because it plays blu-rays.
For the extended edition directors cut of lotr. 12 hours of goodness.
Yes! Lock the phone! Such a pet peeve
There have always been idiots.
I find myself dreading watching anything made after 2010.
I’m not saying everything is bad, or that everything that was earlier was good. But dang…it seems like a good 90% chance the modern movie or TV show is just a bunch of flashy and disruptive CG, incredibly fast editing to try to compete with cell phones for attention, tons of with clips and one-liners. Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
And I don’t think it’s just “things were better back when I was a teenager” bias. I can still find older movies with those some annoying traits earlier, 2010 is just the arbitrary cutoff I’m using here. And I can look back at movies from before I was born, like Hitchcock movies, and see how much better they are at handling a lot of those things.
Everything is poorly lit, the dialogue is inaudible, and all the other sound is way too loud.
The thing you’re noticing is that they’re mastering movies for home theater setups and then everyone else gets a bad re-encode.
When you’re watching a non-HDR 1080p version with Stereo sound using streaming services’ low quality streaming codecs you’re missing a lot more than if you had a HDR1400 4k OLED and a 7.1 Atmos setup with a Blu-ray encode of the movie.
The problem is that now there is just such a large gap between ‘smartphone on a slow connection’ and ‘$80,000 home theater’ that it’s hard to make content that pushes the latter while still being viewable on the former.
Well I’m watching my own Blu-ray and dvd rips on my own Jellyfin server.
And it’s like that in theaters too- parts of things are way too dark, but also with HDR parts are way too blindingly bright. Which causes my pupils to constrict and males it even harder to see the dark parts. When I turn HDR off at home it’s better, but the dark parts are still too dark.
I think it’s an overall obsession with hyper-realism and spectacle. Make the bright lights seem as bright as possible. Make the loud parts seem as loud as possible. There are trillions of dollars fighting for your attention and movies want to do what they can to get a piece of that. So dynamic range, in all ways, is being pushed past the point of comfort, and even further past the point of realism.
That’s like saying “I refuse to drink wines older than 2000.” Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. But, some of the old ones are very, very good.
I watched Altered States for the first time a few years ago and that one got me more than most modern sci fi. It’s a masterpiece imo.
iirc that movie is like a crazy abstract art film, it’s surprising that Hollywood was willing to make it
It totally is but it’s so engaging! I had trouble paying attention to things like Mad God, but Altered States drew me right in.
I wonder if there’s truth to the whole iPad generation thing.
At least LOTR has not been rebooted every 5-10 years like some Marvel/DC movies.
Even if there’s probably someone itching to make a gritty reboot of LOTR.
I mean, look at the source material. One’s an epic saga the other’s a monthly brochure at the magazine corner shop.
I guess, it fits.Lol im definitely calling them monthly brochures from now on
Well, we had the Prequel Trilogy so I guess Peter Jackson probably needs to do an entirely unneeded Fourth Age Trilogy or something?
Prequel even harder and pry the Silmarillion rights from the cold, dead bodies of the Tolkien Estate, then run it into the ground with new films, or worse, a TV show.
Better yet, don’t pry the right, so you have to come up with entirely new stories and new characters outside of what you already own the rights to! It’ll be great!
Everyone should watch the AFI 100.
