The fundamental problem is, there’s nothing we can do about it. A majority prefer the sequels et al., and Hollywood will almost always chase the bigger pile of cash.
I mean, in theory, I could start a campaign to convince those people to stop watching that stuff, and start holding out for new stuff, but if I were capable of that, I’d rather use that super power to convince people not to vote Republican.
What you do is when something you think is really good happens to come along, you support it enthusiastically, and try to convince other people to like it. If you succeed, the powers that be may notice and make more things like it. The important thing is: always support, never attack.
I enjoyed Brenden Fraiser’s Bedazzled. Some movies are decades old or made in a foreign language meaning there are a lot of Americans who will never watch them, so I’m not sure the remake is actually pushing those classics out of the picture. Some movies are so iconic that I wonder why they bother with a remake. Psycho didn’t need to be remade and that’s doubly so for a version that is nearly shot-for-shot the same.
There are two ways how to take this … If you don’t like Star Wars Star Trek or Spiderman that’s fine you don’t have to watch read or listen to it
But the flipside is if is political or societal based it’s like the hoary maxim "America: love it or leave it " because god forbid anyone have criticism or you find out you’ve been wrong in thought or deed and have to be a decent person and not tell racist or sexist jokes
ITS like when 10 years ago when the current backlash started but it was against being "politically correct: because god forbid people shouldn’t get upset at getting called retard or heating their physical preferences being used as slurs… in that case protest and criticism in warranted and needed
Really? Really?
Meh. There is space for scathing reviews. And for informed critiques.
No doubt much of what exists is dreck, produced by studios thinking that the rehash rewarm redo revisited is the safe bet. Many times they are wrong and have lost big on taking that “safe bet.”
But dang I don’t have enough free time available to watch all the quality stuff that is currently easily available to me. Along with fun mindless crud to just relax with.
I’ll happily criticize shortcomings in things I like, because I want them to be better. I won’t criticize things I don’t like, because what’s the point? Even if they did them perfectly, I still wouldn’t like them, so why waste my time?
There is an argument for telling people who constantly complain about things that they don’t have to watch it. But this phrasing in particular (if you replace “consume” with more specific terms like “watch” or “read”) often is used when any criticism at all is mentioned.
Sure, if it’s something you categorically dislike. But then you probably wouldn’t have watched it in the first place. Most things we do watch at least have a potential to be something we like.
Besides, it’s rare we’re actually talking to the author. We’re talking within a community. So it’s not like we expect change either way.
When it comes to music, it may be difficult to “not consume” the stuff you don’t like. It may be part of some other media you consume (e.g. appearing in a movie you want to see). It may be on the radio your coworker or family member is playing. “If you don’t like it don’t consume it” is only completely possible if we’re loners experiencing our own media in isolation.
The issue for me is when a certain zeitgeist comes to almost completely dominate a given artistic field, with the result being that anything that doesn’t conform to said standards gets marginalized if not completely rendered extinct.
2nd tier music is my go-to (aka the underground or what passes for it). The prevailing norm now is to have a whiny off-key singer warbling on about his (her) meaningless life over a lifeless amateurishly executed instrumentalist backing with no dynamics or intricacy anywhere in evidence, in a severely compressed/brickwalled production.
Ok fine I can go listen to something else and stop complaining, you say. Except that these memes have so come to define the modern underground that it is VERY difficult to find an act that HASN’T been “infected” by these memes. They have wholly claimed the band that had been my fave artist for my entire life (The Church) to the extent it is rather painful to listen to their recent stuff.
Yeah, I’ve managed to dig and dig and have somehow miraculously found a few acts which haven’t succumbed, but doing so is such an enervating experience that I can only do so in brief moments here and there.
What I’m trying to say is that there’s cuisine, which can be a sort of art, and then there’s just a mass-market burger and fries, which is not remotely the same thing. One’s crafted by an artisan/artist, and the other’s manufactured by low-wage workers. Both are food, but there’s a fundamental difference between them in the care/imagination/vision that goes into making them.
I’m contending that media is much the same way. You’ve got your Breaking Bad type TV shows, and then you’ve got the ones that are manufactured for a mass market audience. I’m not so sure the latter are really art any more than that Big Mac is. I mean, it’s a big stretch to say that “Real Housewives of Wherever” is actually art. It’s much more like that Big Mac- not good for you, but it may taste good and check that box that says “lunch”.
And also in my opinion, people are just as free to choose to eat at Petra & the Beast (now that I know we live in the same general area), as they are to go to McDonald’s. But there’s something fundamentally different between the two, having eaten at both. There’s nothing wrong with McDonald’s- clearly a lot of people like it, or they wouldn’t be as successful as they are.
What’s the point? This is the point:
If people declined to criticize things they don’t like, the world would be poorer for not having this restaurant review in it.
But I like restaurants and I like food, as presumably do the people who wrote the review.
By “things”, I didn’t mean specific things; I meant, like, genres.
IMHO there’s an underlying unstated criticism by those who tend to criticize things like the MCU universe, Star Wars / Trek reboots and sequels, and sequels and prequels in general. The criticism, at least to my ears, goes past “I don’t like this”. It even goes past “You shouldn’t like this either”. It gets into “you have bad taste for liking these things that I don’t, and you need to improve your tastes” territory. That’s why I have no problem with telling such critics “if you don’t like it don’t consume it”.
Why do I interpret their criticism in this manner? It’s because a lot of the criticism seems to be of the tone that “I don’t like this because it’s more of the same, and wanting more of the same indicates bad taste. You should only want different stuff”. IMHO there’s nothing wrong with more of the same of something that’s done well. Of course if something is not done well, then criticize it on whatever basis makes it poorly done. But something being “more of the same” doesn’t automatically make it bad, especially if the original was good.
On the other hand, even if Leonardo da Vinci was good, only a bad artist would imitate Leonardo da Vinci. There is something to be said for originality.
If “More of the same” is what you want, why not just watch the original again? Even in a sequel (or prequel, or reboot), there has to be at least something new to make the effort worth it.
Take Star Wars. A big complaint about The Force Awakens is that it’s largely just a beat-for-beat remake of the original 1977 film. What is the point of that? They could have added in something more, but what they did try to add in was squandered by doing a bad job of it.
The story of a Stormtrooper rebelling against the indoctrination of The Empire, or at least The Empire Lite, could have been a compelling story, but they wasted it on re-telling the same “It blew up real good!” story of the Death Star.
Compare that to Rogue One, and Andor. They tell a story that fits into the existing property, but adds considerably to the overall story arch of the SW universe. And they did a good job of it, producing the best SW properties of the last decade, at least. If the “more of the same” crowd did this more often, there would be fewer complaints.
IMHO there’s room for both. TV makes for some better examples of different versions of an original all being good. The cozy mystery genre is a good example. Murder She Wrote didn’t get worse just because Mrs. Fletcher kept running into similar mysteries. Later variations on the theme like Psych and Monk are also good, despite them being more of the same.
I’m not going to defend the sequel trilogy, but IMHO the similarities between Episodes IV and VII weren’t among the problems. I don’t plan to watch them again, and I have criticized them here on this board for various problems. But I’ve limited that criticism to the movies themselves, not to people who did happen to like them. The tone that sometimes comes across, however, is that some of the critics don’t limit themselves to that, and they get into criticizing the audience for enjoying more of the same rather than film for being more of the same. And to those critics, IMHO the response of “if you don’t like it don’t consume it” is warranted.
There’s also an element of “this is childish, and there’s something wrong with you if you like it as an adult” going on. You get the same thing with video games a lot of the time.
I mostly agree. I despise modern horror films. That doesn’t mean that a channel devoted to them is something I would ban. It does mean that gratuitously sick and violent ads for such films coming in the middle of my watching other stuff does piss me off.
But crap like OAN and Fox “news” that is spelling lies, propaganda, and stuff from the kremlin- they should be sued out of existence.
Despicable racist films- at least should not be lauded as “great”.
His style or an exact copy of one of his works?
Ideally. But I think a successful book can fund more quirky books than a “tentpole” movie can fund quirky movies (the ratio of “profits of a tentpole” over “cost of a risk-taking movie” is less than the ratio of “profits from a Grisham/Nora Roberts” over “cost of a risk-taking book”) - I could be wrong though.
You are not going to make a name for yourself in the art world by copying someone else’s style, let alone exact works. Though, apparently Tony Tetro still makes a living producing copies and pastiches for private clients…