I'm a film major. I wrote about film on print for quite a while. This was not in the US. I did want to prescribe, but not to the masses. To other crítics, to the pedantic purists that thought Bruce Lee was unimportant and Spielberg formulaic and uninspired, and that unless your name is David Lynch anything American is worse by default. People who thought anything with emotion was trash for the masses. And I was there, at the newspaper, saying *no*, romcoms can be of value, there's an artform to the action movie, the screwball comedy, and every genre film. I'm really proud of my time as a critic.
Nowadays I see everyone shitting on super heroes and remakes, they're easy targets to make people think that you're distinguished. Complain about sequels and reboots, and I say "Shakespeare is remade 100 times a year, a remake, reboot or whatever is always an artistic reconstruction that says a lot about its time, it's history, it's socioeconomic context. By studying the multiple versions of a story, we understand ourselves".
Many critics are just sad elitists because now they must share the cultural zeitgeist with everyone else, when even Roger Ebert, when you read his reviews, was historically a lot more open and fair than many of his admirers today.
That’s an interesting take on the remake I hadn’t considered before. But as someone without an artsy bone in my body, I wish something other than superhero movies could be made
Americans today are so sharply divided in what they consider to be acceptable beliefs and values that to create films with broad appeal, most filmmakers (and those who pay them) either (a) go out on a limb to promote their own values, or (b) resort to known-good tropes and remakes.
Perhaps no one wants to write a beautiful, thoughtful, non-politically charged screenplay anymore. Or maybe doing so would itself be seen as a political statement?
> I wish something other than superhero movies could be made
You can literally watch movies all day every day and never watch a super-hero. It was never so easy to watch exactly what you want, when you want, spending so little. I don't get this kind of insatisfaction nowadays. Maybe the hidden premise is that what bothers you is not a lack of content you enjoy, but the fact that so many people love so much a thing that you consider inferior and a abject. To put it bluntly: that's cultural elitism.
You're right but it doesn't really feel that way (and I would think that as a percentage of spending, surely the superhero franchises have a fair fraction?)
It would be nice to see more new, original sci-fi and action. (but perhaps the other poster is on the money, and I am sure from a studio perspective it's easier to go with the tried and tested rather than out on a limb)
God I miss Ebert. It's not that I agreed with him always. It's that I knew where he stood, and I found his writing entertaining. As my familiarity of him grew over the years (decades!), I could accurately guess whether or not I would like a movie based on his review, whether he liked it or not. He's been hard to replace for me.
I saw "Enter the Dragon" as a teen and liked it a lot. I rewatched it recently and had a hard time thinking of anything good about it :-/
I've turned into my dad. As a teen, I begged him to see a movie I thought was great. We went to see it, and on the way out I was like "well? what do you think?" He thought for a while, and came up with a rather lame compliment he'd obviously struggled to come up with.
I had the reverse experience, in a way: As a teen I though it was just fair. I thought the fight scenes - the reason we saw the film, of course - were gimmicky, repetitive, and unconvincing, and thought the same of other kung fu films. The rest of the movie was odd and boring. It was heretical and I kept that opinion to myself.
I saw it again in the last few years and while for me the rest of the movie was awful, the fight scenes were mesmerizing. Bruce Lee's physicality, the physical acting, is on a different planet than anything I've seen. Lee could have been a dancer or the original Andy Serkis - not that kung fu actor was a bad career move either.
Lee trained as a competitive ballroom dancer before he pivoted to martial arts. The two actually have a lot in common, though the purposes are quite different!
I agree that Lee's grace and style are fun to watch. It's also painfully obvious that he way outclassed his opponents in the movie, sort of like Fred Astaire dancing with a football player. I suspect that his ballroom training was the secret sauce that put his martial arts at an elegant level that the other martial arts practitioners couldn't match.
> It's also painfully obvious that he way outclassed his opponents in the movie, sort of like Fred Astaire dancing with a football player
Yes; the others occupied far too much of the screen time, which was very frustrating! It was like going to see Jimi Hendrix and hearing mostly bass and drum breaks. It's a vehicle for Lee; almost everything else in the movie sucks anyway; just find excuses to put Lee on the screen doing something!
But for me, I'd add to grace and style: The power of the emotion he could convey just through his body was incredible. I don't have a great appreciation for dance, but I've seen a couple best-in-the-world level dancers do something similar.
I'm not always willing to dox myself, but I can say it was a big newspaper in South America.
I also made a comment, not an article or a study. I don't have any ready sources to present you, I merely expressed my opinion and you're free to take it as such.
That doesn't make a lot of a difference, there will always be enough differences between two versions to make the effort worthwhile. 1916s Romeo and Juliet quite different from 1996's Baz Lhurman Romeo+Juliet.
Nowadays I see everyone shitting on super heroes and remakes, they're easy targets to make people think that you're distinguished. Complain about sequels and reboots, and I say "Shakespeare is remade 100 times a year, a remake, reboot or whatever is always an artistic reconstruction that says a lot about its time, it's history, it's socioeconomic context. By studying the multiple versions of a story, we understand ourselves".
Many critics are just sad elitists because now they must share the cultural zeitgeist with everyone else, when even Roger Ebert, when you read his reviews, was historically a lot more open and fair than many of his admirers today.