Overton window of quality shifting - 2000s movies being praised
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Full disclosure I haven't watched to, or listened to this video. I just saw that the premise is "2000s movies looked good" and that's enough for me.
I consider myself a bit of a film guy. I was born in the early 90s, so I should have nostalgia for the 2000s films, right?
Well I mostly watched what we had recorded VHS tapes growing up, Neverending Story, Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones trilogy, etc.
So like any kid I'd watch and rewatch those movies. So around the time where I'm starting to use my head and observe, entering in my early teens and going to theaters I can tell that movies are different to the classics I'd watch and rewatch on tape, or older movies I'd see on cable.
CGI looked ugly to me, film looked more artificial.
I've always been able to tell CGI and it always pulled me out of the film. It's just too contrast-y with real footage that I don't know how people can be immersed by CGI effects.
Even stop motion effects are real physical objects being captured with the same cameras that capture the rest of the movie. My brain can accept a bad stop motion effect better than a good CGI effect easier because the stop motion effect is a physical object.
CGI it feels like a PS3 game just entered into the frame. I don't know how it's not immersion breaking for others.
Anyways I've always maintained the same opinion I had 20 years ago. The early 2000s were awful for movies (and haven't gotten any better, only worse) and awful for music (rock died in the early 2000s, everything started trending towards stuff like Coldplay and Justin Timberlake whereas 90s had Alice in Chains as a major band on the radio), but the early 2000s were great for video games.
That third opinion, the video game one is one I feel even moreso now in hindsight. I merely enjoyed video games not realizing how great they were in the early 2000s, whereas I could detect the real dropoff with film and music in the early 2000s.
To me, the 90s was the last good decade for film, not just in things like acting and scripts, and overall feel, but also how movies looked. I really don't think 2000s movies have that filmic look I love about 90s and earlier films. King Kong 2005 looks artificial and like people are doing all this post process color grading, and that was the standard. This color grade crap was a plague on film.
So to see 2000s films being praised for their visual style is pretty bad, and it's like yeah, if you judge anything from right now, it will look good, because modern movies are past the rubicon of even being considered films anymore. But that shouldn't be the standard. It'd be like praising Maroon 5, that pile of garbage, because they're not Cardi B.
That's what happens when your measurement is the modern day.
If you consider 2026 then yeah 2000s movies are masterpieces of visual intention.
If you consider every other decade the 2000s was a giant dive off the cliff visually.
The Warriors from 1979 has more visual interest than all the 2000s films put together, and it was mostly down to good looking film stock and good lighting decisions.
I had 2004's Starsky & Hutch remake with Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Carmen Electra, Amy Smart, Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman & Snoop Dogg on in the background yesterday.
It's this uncanny valley time capsule of an absurd time that no longer exists. A whole era of campy buddy & romantic comedies with repeating typecast characters with Stiller playing the neurotic Jew, Wilson the Cali stoner archetype with the messy mop & broken nose, Vince Vaughn playing the same lovable a-hole, Amy Smart being a baddie until she ages out, etc.
I don't even know any of the people anymore I would've enjoyed this with. The one liners are cringe but familiar. The little serenade snippets of Wilson playing guitar were also familiar but also so foreign now.
Most of the cast is White. Or at least (((white))).
It doesn’t seem like this film should be almost 25 years old, but it is.
The ending has a cameo with the OG Starksy & Hutch actors meeting Stiller & Wilson as doppelgangers. Only Wilson & Stiller are now as old as the old fucks they were supposedly revering in the finale. I won't bother to look it up, but the OG actors could very well be dead.
Modern day Pedowood has stopped making buddy/raunchy/absurdist/formulaic/typecast comedies altogether. And no one really definitively knows why.
Who is the modern day Stiller & Wilson? If there isn't, did any other buddy comedy duos succeed them before going extinct?
Does Adam Sandler still make Adam Sandler movies? What happened to Will Ferrell? Did he just age out? (He was on SNL in the 90s).
Adam Sandler still makes Adam Sandler movies. He makes them for Netflix.
Thanks. That's what I figured.
It if it's on a streaming service, it doesn't exist in my world.
Yeah don't get me wrong, there's plenty of movies I can go back to and love from that time period, but I just think the 2000s wasn't great as a time for "films". But 100% with the non-woke, non-"diverse" comedy movies that are just meant to be fun.
Waiting (2005) is like that for me where I can rewatch it and it feels totally like a time capsure. There's only one non-white guy in the entire movie. A single black guy who is the dishwasher. Edit: forgot it's got Luiz Gomez hispanic guy who's one of the chefs, so two out of the entire cast.
Also I may get crap for this, but I like the movie Employee of the Month starring Dane Cook. I know everyone's supposed to hate Dane Cook and I know Employee of the Month is objectively a movie made for 14 year olds, but it's just a feel good type comedy that they made back then that are really re-watchable in my opinion.
Also one of the greatest movies ever made in my opinion K-Pax is in the 2000s, 2001. K-Pax is a masterpiece I'd put in my top ten films of all time.
But yeah 2000s had better comedies than I gave them credit for at the time. In some ways 90s comedies, as much as I loved them, haven't aged as well as the 2000s comedies. Like Dumb and Dumber is still the greatest comedy of all time and it was 90s, but 2000s was way better for comedies than I gave it credit for back then; Step Brothers, Hot Rod, Waiting, Van Wilder, Just Friends.
A lot of those have aged better than a lot of the 90s comedies I loved.
I guess that's true. I generally am fond of the 2000s as a time period, so it's interesting to see people talk about movies from that period.
On the topic of 2000s movies, I will note that as the 2000s slowly ended there was an influx of infamous movies by Friedberg and Seltzer that are sometimes credited with contributing to the death of the parody film genre, Disaster Movie in particular. I think it could be described as a pretty notable harbinger of the death of classic comedy movies.
I recall Zoolander was so culturally influential for us in the 90s.
Then I hyped it up & sat down with someone for a first watch a decade later. It was awkward silence for everyone involved.
Then there was Zoolander 2 another decade later that I don't recall a single gag. And never finished.
If you didn't laugh at the freak gasoline fight then you must repair your soul
CGI is a tool. If it is used sparingly and deliberately and is done well and you won't notice it. And I guarantee you that there a lot of movies where you haven't noticed CGI effects.
King Kong 2005 is the perfect example for one of the first movies which used CGI as its foundation. The Star Wars prequels too. And in those movies its simply impossible to hide the CGI. Especially if the CGI is bad.
LotR used a lot of CGI but practical effects were its foundation. As did Pirates of the Caribbean. And those effects still hold up today. Because they were done well and were merely a tool to enhance the scenes.
Since then CGI has regressed in quality and become the foundation for the majority of movies. Compare Davy Jones with modern day CGI. The difference in quality is obvious.
That's why people praise 00s movies. Because on average they are objectively better than all of the slop we've been served for the last 10-15 years.
To counter that, I'd say for the good examples you give, like Pirates and LotR, they still look horrible compared to the T-Rex CGI in Jurassic Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_i5TKdmhs
2:13 in the video.
That's the best blatant CGI blending into the scene ever got and it was the early 90s.
In Lord of the Rings, the Mines of Morla where they're fighting that giant troll thing, it looks like a video game. Likewise for the Balrog.
Same with Pirates of the Carribean and the skeleton CGI scenes, not one movie has come close to blending CGI well with the overall look of the scene as Jurassic Park.
Which means that in order to use CGI effectively you need to be Steven Spielberg, put an inordinate amount of effort, time, money, artistry in it and apparently it's not worth it to do that as even a perfectionist like Peter Jackson who made background orcs have realistic chain-mail couldn't make the fight against that giant troll in the mines of morla look like it's not a video game.
To be fair, the context for the trex’s shot make it the perfect candidate for CGI. Dark scene, minimal lighting, and there is rain. That can hide a lot of imperfections in the effect. Add to the fact that it was probably one of a small handful of shots they needed to animate something of that and the quality makes sense.
Technically... it was a bit more involved than that: it was a 3D model based on photoscans of a full-size real life animatornic T-Rex:
https://youtu.be/B4J9TBlFxAg
You could technically say it was one of the earliest proto-concepts of photogrammetry.
The CGI was also animated based on the kinematics of the animatronic (similar to rotoscoping), which is why it moved so well and looked so good.
CGI based on practical effect puppets/animatronics are always far superior to just CGI rendered objects (since they have real-to-life reference modeling to draw from).
It's why even when some films opt for night time shots with minimal lighting or rain it still looks very uncanny (i.e., the recent Planet of the Apes movies).