Ditto on Shooter. Great movie.
Yeah, that was actually a movie we watched in the screenwriting class I took in high school.
It definitely fell susceptible to that trend, but I remember just about every movie me and my mom would walk out of for a pretty long period we'd go "it wasn't bad, but I hate the shaky cam....I can't make out the action and it gives me a headache". Shaky cam was a plague on movies for way too long and I'm glad it's been abandoned at this point. As someone pointed out, John Wick helped a lot.
As for the grittiness, to me it's an acting style that we've never really gotten away from since I'd say the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know I'll get crap for saying this, but I think the Lord of the Rings was a big milestone in changing the style of acting in movies and not for the better.
Acting now tries to "sell a realism" instead of trying to sell their character.
There's a great middle ground between absurdely expresssionistic acting like the silent film era, and attempts at gritty realism, and I feel that the perfect middle ground was between the 1960s - 1990s.
They dialed it down to an artform where you believed the reality because they expressed the character properly.
Indiana Jones isn't like any person you've ever met, and that's why you believe him, because it sells the reality comes about by seeing a very specific personality expressed on screen as good as possible.
If they tried to make Indiana Jones talk and act like "realism" you'd get something that feels less real. This is a difficult concept to convey because acting is so subjective, but a writer, director and actors attempt to sell "realism" doesn't feel as real as when a writer, director and actor each do their job to sell "wonder" and "movie magic".
Yeah, that's the thing I like about Bourne 1 is the girl is one of the few women characters in movies that I like. Cute in that distinctly European way, and the soundtrack and fashion styles and editing feels very early 2000s/late 90s and the action wasn't shaky cam.
So it's an enjoyable watch for feeling like a time capsule even if it's not remotely a go-to movie for me.
But where that first one felt like that short period of when we had cultural specificity, and decade uniqueness, the sequels feel like that monolithic culture that doesn't feel distinct that's been the same for like 20 years now.
Like Bourne supremacy feels like basically any movie from the 2010s unlike the first Bourne which did feel like an early 2000s movie (which is a good thing)
Yeah I don't blame Matt Damon for how Bourne was made, I'm just saying that's his major film/franchise and it's not one I care for so it's not like I'm a Matt Damon fan anyways.
The two Matt Damon films I like that I can think of are saving private Ryan and Good Will Hunting.
And that's a decent case. The worser case is because of the different incentives. One of the different incentives is to shape the mind of people against the will of the parents. They see it as their chance to use a position of authority to enact their will and agenda on a captive audience. Some people are so wired that they trade a good amount of money for that.
That's why you see these authoritarian moderators on basically ever website, most of whom do it for absolutely zero pay, because the thrill of controlling the narrative is reward in and of itself.
Anthony Hopkins, and yeah, he's a gem.
James Woods is intelligent and has personal thoughts, as does Mel Gibson and a short list of a few others and they're a good actor, but generally I agree.
The model should be like Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise's main agenda seems to be making the best movie he can for the audiences...not for the critics, not for his elitist friends in the industry, but to make the best theater-going experience.
That's what an actor should strive for.
That's what every job position should strive for....If you're a truck driver, excell at truck driving, if you're a salesman, excel at that, etc.
Seems like so many actors put their job second or see it as a mere means to promote "the message"
You commented before I made my comment. I actually don't like the Bourne movies. The first one is tolerable, but I never loved it.
They're too self serious and in many ways changed the direction of action films and every other movie wanted to be a Bourne-like.
Action movies were way better before Bourne came out.
I do like Good Will Hunting. If a movies good, I don't care who the actor is, I can enjoy the movie.
I never really liked the Bourne movies. I feel they basically killed action movies as I knew them and loved them. Every action movie after wanted to be a gritty, shaky cam, overly serious political thriller.
But this was the video I saw many years ago where I straight up disliked Matt Damon. Rarely has a celebrity so quickly exposed how much of a liberal douche they are before the age of twitter.
That was one of the best things I've ever read. Thank you for linking that article.
If it were only middle schoolers, I wouldn't be complaining.
Throw on any youtube video on the front page and see if the clearly college aged dude with a broccoli haircut doesn't use those exact words I'm talking about.
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When I said back in the day, I prefaced middle school. I remember it being a thing for a bit in middle school. All middle schoolers do cringy stuff.
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It wasn't so much talking, as it was spouting stuff out. These words weren't part of our adopted vocabulary. We'd also yell out "I'm Rick James!!" because of the Chapelle show. The Fo' Shizzle was more like that than an actual way of speaking.
What I'm talking about going on today is actual change in core communication which is much different.
That's encouraging at least.
The internet does give a bias of how prevalent things are. Part of it is the difficulty with things like Youtube comments is you never know how old someone is, so you just sort of have this vague idea that they're younger than you, but that's as far as that knowledge goes so it just feels like the borg or something, like total saturation, whereas if I knew the breakdowns like "75% of youtube commenters are between 10 - 15 years old", I'd go "yeah I was cringy as well at 13".
I'm really glad my parents kept me away from the internet and that stuff until the right time.
I think it was like 6th grade when my dad walked me through getting an email address and that felt like a big deal, like I took a step towards maturity. That's how I communicated with my friends was through email, because while texting existed, no one wanted to do it because most people had flip phones and typing one sentence on those numpad keys took like 2 whole minutes. So we'd email.
I really wish everyone communicated through email again. I really hate texting. I know I sound like a 60 year old right now haha.
But yeah, I'm also really glad I didn't get a smart phone until way later. Didn't have one through all of high school, and there were people who had one in middle school. I had an Ipod so I could listen to music, and I had the computer at home where I'd email people so I really didn't feel like I was missing out, and when I changed schools when I moved in high school, I didn't make any friends anyways, so I never cared to have a smart phone until later, and I'm very grateful for that.
It was hard enough growing up in that time, just with myspace comparing yourself with others, without having to constantly have an addicting brain rot thing constantly in your pocket where high school drama never stops because of constant texting.
If I had a kid, I'd probably raise them practically amish when it comes to phones and tablets until they were like 9th grade.
They are correct in that they look at observable present reality and can tell what is apparent to anyone with eyes and can tell there are issues.
Where they are not correct is jumping to evolutionary arguments, calling people subhuman, believing that certain things make someone not made in the image of God. They are not correct because they're not starting with the Bible. If they started with the Bible they'd know that all people are made in God's image and every person comes from 1 of 3 people, the son's of Noah, and there's no evolution.
Yeah, I reject the concept of racism. It's a marxist word that has never been used in any way except as a weapon against white people.
I don't play those games, if people call me racist, I laugh and don't care, and I don't care about the perception of racism.
That said, there is a legitimate type of person who says "Hitler was right" and "all black people should be lynched" and I'm not going to embrace that just because the left calls everything nazi.
That's sort of like people saying the star wars prequels are good because the Disney star wars movies are garbage....No, two things can suck at the same time. Both suck for different reasons.
I want society to have the uncomfortable conversations about race and the inner city that they would rather gouge out their eyes than begin to have those conversations, but there's a difference between that and "black people are subhuman".
As a Christian, though I do believe in biological differences, I reject evolution, and believe all people descend from Noah's 3 sons, as it says in scripture, so while I'm not a denier of biology differences (because they're easily observable) like much of the church tries to be because the implications are too scary to wade into, my belief in biological variances and determinism ends where evolutionary arguments begin, and most stormfront people literally believe black people are not made in the image of God and are not as human as white people, and they rely on evolutionary arguments and don't start from scripture.
Not true. I've stayed basically the same in most of my tastes, ways of talking, what I find funny, etc.
I can't think of something I used to do 20 years ago ironically anyways.
Likewise I don't use the zoomer slang ironically now.
The only thing I do ironically at the moment is joke with my parents telling them my preferred pronouns for the day and stuff like that.
If you think I'll be doing that unironically in 20 years, then I shudder at the thought.
The only thing that got better was memes in my opinion.
I absolutely hated the early 2000s memes. Ceiling cat, I can haz cheeseburger, that kid doing the fist bump, etc.
To me those were peak lame comedy and I couldn't understand why anyone found that stuff funny, whereas memes are MUCH funnier nowadays in my opinion with the soyjacks, the pepe's, etc. They hit on the pulse of society in a way that good comedy should, whereas the old memes were like stuff that women find cute and normies find funny imo.
Around the gamergate era with the rise of Pepe memes I found myself shocked at how funny memes had gotten because they became less of a normie thing and more of a "I want to have a laugh dunking on leftists" sort of thing.
I saw a quote about a month ago.
If you treat incompetence/ stupidity as malice, both will go away
If you treat malice as incompetency/stupidity, both will keep growing unchecked
(I know I butchered the phrasing, but the idea is the same)
The first episode was 2011 when it was a UK show, but still had Penn and Teller as the judges. Nothing was different about the show except the host and most of the contestants were British.
When it was brought to the US it was 2014 and it's still going as of this year and the contestants are still the same as it's always been as far as I can tell. I watch clips on Youtube. You see, the show actually allows the individual magicians to upload their respective episodes to their own youtube channels, so most Fool Us segments are uploaded in their entirety without having to pay to watch, scattered across all the contestants youtube channels.
But you click on one, and dozens of others are recommended on the sidebar.
I didn't know that about his daughter either.
Have you watched the show?
Penn and Teller know basically every technique there is. Fooling them usually boils down to did the magician effectively use multiple techniques in order to make them guess the wrong one that they used primarily, or if it's something where they know exactly what was used such as sleight of hand, if the magician is so skilled at sleight of hand that Penn and Teller don't see him doing it, aka they didn't "catch" him, they consider that fooling them even though they know how the trick is done in principle.
Fooling Penn and Teller, because they know the various ways any given trick could possibly be pulled off, more revolves around them correctly or incorrectly guessing the way or if their act was so flawless that they didn't in the moment see the method, they also reward the magician.
Many magicians have been on the show and say exactly how it works.
First they show the producers exactly how the trick works, and then they re-perform the tricks for Penn and Teller, and the producers via a mic confirms or denies that Penn and Teller's theory is correct or incorrect.
Now I'm sure there's some magicians they claim fooled them, that actually didn't, but because they liked the magicians act enough, they let on like they didn't fool them, but this is a rare case of a reality show that seems pretty legit.
Yeah, Penn, though I disagree with him on much, like his atheism, used to be a very intelligent and principled thinker who was entertaining to listen to, and you're right, he actually respects Christians who evangelize because he says that if you truly believe eternity is at stake, how much would a Christian have to hate me to not want to try and preach about the dangers of hell, and that the Christians who aren't doing that because they want to be "nice" would be like not shoving someone out of the way of an incoming truck because you're worried you'll offend them for shoving them.
And yeah, I heard that TDS has made him not such a good thinker like he used to be.
What tipped you off...was it the "you don't deserve my chaiiild....(cut to her walking like the strong independent empowered black woman that she is)....she comes from a long line of revolutionaries (cut to various BLM type montages, bombs, police in riot gear).