Films of the late 1980s-1990s

[renzhe]

Actually, I was completely joking.

pwned lol

[Outofin]

Sounds like we have a lot of common grounds. The Killer was one of the greatest action movie. Heat was also decent. The Killer has some distinguishable cultural factors. Two things: 惺惺相惜, 快意恩仇. Heat definitely has the 快意恩仇 part. Robert de Niro went back to kill the traitor when he could leave safely. When he struggled between the decisions on the highway was the most touching scene of the movie.

I'll write a rather long post about them when I have time.

Hollywood is running out of ideas, that's why they're recycling so much.

Hollywood copied 无间道 in The Departed, which is not even close to the original. I accepted it as a common practice of the industry, until The Departed won a string of serious awards. That's when I lost confidence in Hollywood.

[renzhe]

Just look at how many blockbusters are either:

- Remakes of foreign movies

- Remakes of Hollywood movies

- Comic adaptations

- Video game adaptations

This is the lack of ideas that I'm referring to. That's why I've been watching mostly European and Asian movies in the last few years. Which is a shame, considering the concentration of talent that is still present in Hollywood.

[gato]

It's not the lack of ideas but a business decision. Plenty of great American movies are still made, but they just don't sell as many tickets, or they are made for TV.

[renzhe]

The most interesting American movies nowadays are independent movies, not produced by Hollywood, or at least that is my impression.

[gato]

Yup, most of them are smaller movies that cost maybe $10 million to make and don't require need to sell a lot of tickets to make a profit. The big blockbusters cost $100-200 million a piece to make now, and so the studio are very conservative about the target audience so that they can reach as broad of an audience as possible.

In the US, at least, it's people in their teens and early twenties who go to the movies the most, and so the studios target their movies to this audience. Before the advent of VCR (and later DVDs), movie audience was more mixed. Older folks nowadays, particularly those with young kids, tend to stay home and watch TV, and so TV drama end up being much more sophisticated than most movies in the theater. At least, that's the market dynamics in the US. It's kind of that way in China, as well.