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.
Some notable things about much older movies (like Hitchcock): the limitations forced them to work harder at many things.
Black & white has contrast concerns, no color so you need to imply it in other ways.
Film costs influenced the length of a movie, so lots of those old movies are shorter, or often limited to 90 minutes. If you wanted to go longer you need to justify the length in film reel units.
Then you have pre-code movies where what you could show or say was less limited, then post-Code where the dialog suddenly becomes filled with innuendo, and typically fast-paced, so you have to pay attention and get the references.
I suspect many movies today are produced like pop music - the simpler it is, the broader it can reach.
same, 2010, is when movies and shows became just SLOP. this doesnt include shows that started in the 2000s but survived into 2010s. cant tolerate the new treks, they are just too bad, aside from prodigy and LOWER decks. also the titles for movies are just lazy asf now. and theres the significant increase in copaganda, military propaganda movies and shows.
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.
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.
Some notable things about much older movies (like Hitchcock): the limitations forced them to work harder at many things.
Black & white has contrast concerns, no color so you need to imply it in other ways.
Film costs influenced the length of a movie, so lots of those old movies are shorter, or often limited to 90 minutes. If you wanted to go longer you need to justify the length in film reel units.
Then you have pre-code movies where what you could show or say was less limited, then post-Code where the dialog suddenly becomes filled with innuendo, and typically fast-paced, so you have to pay attention and get the references.
I suspect many movies today are produced like pop music - the simpler it is, the broader it can reach.
same, 2010, is when movies and shows became just SLOP. this doesnt include shows that started in the 2000s but survived into 2010s. cant tolerate the new treks, they are just too bad, aside from prodigy and LOWER decks. also the titles for movies are just lazy asf now. and theres the significant increase in copaganda, military propaganda movies and shows.
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.