Film and Episodic Content Discussion Thread

Every now and then Netflix' propensity to hurl batches of new shows at subscribers in the hope that something (anything) will stick, actually works out. One such show is WHO IS ERIN CARTER? I just watched episode-1 and can't wait to watch more.

But here's the thing: this show is ridiculous in too many ways to ignore. It's one of those "woman with a mysterious past" tales that will slowly reveal all the bad stuff the main character used to do, but she moved here (Barelona) to get away from all that, so would everyone please just leave her alone so she doesn't have to break out her "particular set of skills" and leave bloody corpses all over the sun-drenched Mediterranean landscape? Is that too much to ask?

But here's the thing #2: I just don't care. The real reason to watch this thing is a spectacular actress named Evin Ahmad. I first saw her in SNABBA CASH, a show I don't quite like enough to keep watching--but I want to see this woman act in pretty much anything else. Oh, yes, there's another actor here I liked a lot in the one show I saw him in, SHETLAND. Douglas Henshall will apparently show up in Barcelona any minute now, and if nothing else, he might have the horsepower to actually oppose Ms. Ahmad, who could act the peel right off an orange.

She acts this part as if she's taking part in a masterpiece, not a derivative, Punch 'n' Judy EU actioner. I like her all the more for doing so. She does a lot of nuanced "face acting" in her many reaction shots (the camera adores her face), and those moments are the best part of this production.

Will somebody please cast this woman in great piece of cinema with an exceptional script? (Pedro Almodóvar, I'm looking at you).

 

RANT INCOMING....

Okay so what the f**k happened to actors in Hollywood?

I got wind of (yet another) ALIEN sequel/prequel/cash-in/whatever-the-f**k, called ALIEN ROMULUS. Plot details are extremely scant, but the basic premise is:

"Young people from a distant world must face the most terrifying life form in the universe."

So we go from Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Koto, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt and Ian Holm... mature, experienced, veteran actors... a cast that could've slayed almost any Shakespearean play with gusto, to......

this?



Even Aliens and Alien 3 had Bill Paxton, Michael Beihn, Lance Henricksen, Paul Reiser, Charles Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Pete Postlethwaite... for godsake, a f'ing OCEAN OF TALENT. It really shows how seriously the studio took those movies to fill them with those kinds of actors.

Now they are casting from the CW / Netflix teen drama playbook. I am just not at all impressed with this cast with this caliber of film. It just doesn't make any sense to me why they are now turning this into a teen slasher flick.

To go even deeper, I am wondering who is going to replace the great actors of old? Where is next Pacino, Deniro, Walken, Washington, Freeman, Hoffman, Hanks, Day-Lewis, Nicholson, Hopkins, Ford, Streep, Blanchett, Sarandon, Kidman, Moore, Mirren, etc.... these actors have GRAVITAS... SCREEN PRESENCE and they are only getting older and wont be around forever.

I have not been impressed with the new crop of young actors in the last decade or so... they seem paper thin on presence, and don't strike me as having the gravitas necessary to burst out of the screen like the older gen did. Some of them are talented, but I notice a trend of this weird Disney-fication of actors, where alot of them just seem to have too much of a "sunny disposition" and don't look like they have any pathos, internal scars, soul turmoil... the stuff you saw bursting out of the old crop of actors in their younger days. Is Denzel really going to be replaced by his son, John David??? A guy who basically doesn't have screen presence (IMO). Is Deniro going to be replaced by f'ing Timothy Chalemet (who I actually like, but com'on! it's not just happening). Is Meryl Streep getting replaced by f'ing Jennifer Lawrence???

Bleh!

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ACTING???

 

Bravo. Most of us would probably sit it through and feel sick and more cheated afterwards.

 

Yeah they want $1 per subscriber per year to go SAG for them to decide what to do with the money (presumably distribute it to actors). LOL. Fran Drescher and the other guy whatever his name is aren't very bright. Because then the DGA and WGA will demand the same thing and there's no way streamers and studio can afford that. Studios offered a very generous raise similar to what they gave the DGA and WGA and SAG balked. f'ing morons.

 

LOL, the Tom Cruise comments made me laugh harder than I should. I HATED the new MI... how do you make a dumb spy thriller nearly 3 hours long?

Yup, it speaks to the era of content. Not movies or television, but CONTENT... which includes everything now: movies, TV, youtube, tik tok, podcasts, it all falls under the same umbrella and means the same thing to the suits... the idea being the more time you can steal from people, the more money you make... doesn't matter what it is. This leads to everything being more generic, since they lose the uniqueness of their identity.

It used to be CINEMA... and the studio treated it like cinema... giving it the reverence the medium deserved, while still trying to eek out a profit. When you call it CONTENT, it just becomes shovelware and is treated as such. There have always been bad movies, but I'll take a bad movie with Pacino, or Ryan Oneal or Rutger Hauer directed by Walter Hill or Sydney Pollack or Joe Dante, over a bad piece of content with the latest sunny, smiling, dull, bland Mickey Mouse club performer who should probably be doing porn instead (and would probably make more money via onlyfans).

Same for TV. It's a massive problem I'm sure many creatives are aware of, but I wonder if the studios realize how badly they are f'ing themselves in the long run. Because when people start to devalue your brand, the entire row of dominoes fall. Disney's stock is currently trading at a pathetic $82 a share... down from almost $200 in 2021.

 

I don't get it guys. Isn't this exactly what they should be asking for if they want to enter a negotiation and get something more realistic in the end? You know that if they went in with something more reasonable, the studio execs who control all of the money are not going to give them shit.

If the studios/streamers truly can't afford it, then they won't get it. But they'll get nothing if they don't ask for it.

 

It's bad faith negotiation.

The WGA and DGA already made their deals, so any deal for the actors is going to be similar... $1 per subscriber is f'ing insane. It's not even close to realistic and would mean less money for their productions, so they'd also be f'ing themselves. You're supposed to respect the process and not add unnecessary bullshit. They're just bad negotiators and shouldn't be let in the room. Fran Drescher played the Nanny for f**k sake. This is why actors aren't allowed anywhere near a keyboard. They're good at saying things OTHER PEOPLE write. When they start thinking for themselves you get childish gobbledygook like $1 per subscriber. It's like going to a job at McDonalds and asking for $50/hour. Managers don't even get that.

They should've been negotiating a raise in minimum rates, which is fair and makes more sense, and which is what the other guilds were smart enough to present. And this is what they actually were doing until they decided to ADD the subscriber bonus thing. They wanted an 11% rate increase when the DGA and WGA got 5%, followed by increases of 4% and 3.5%. I get starting out high there and negotiating down, but they wanted MOARRRRRRRRRR and couldn't help themselves. The studios flat out said sharing revenue from subscribers can't sustain the business model, and the DGA/WGA were smart enough to know it will eventually eat into their budgets, which means shittier "content", which means even less subs, which means less shows, which means less money in their pockets long term.

 

Speaking of the MCU, looks like we are finally seeing superhero fatigue set in....

THE MARVELS, which is the sequel to CAPTAIN MARVEL is projected to have one of the worst openings ever for an MCU movie. Pre-sales are 69 percent behind Guardians 3, 72 percent behind Quantumania, and 42 percent behind Eternals. Projected to open somewhere between $50M-$75M and end domestically at $121M-$189M. This is with a production budget of $270M excluding marketing, which is generally at least $150, maybe $200M for these kinds of movies. With distributors getting roughly half the box office, this movie is in serious trouble and the downtrend for MCU films continues. Keep in mind, the original CAPTAIN MARVEL grossed $1.1Billion world wide. This isn't getting anywhere near that.

 

I've had Marvel fatigue since I watched the first Avengers movie...

 

Yup. Hollywood is global business now. Has been for some time, but now we're really starting to see it with streamers. Sony has video games and electronics, so kept their noses out of streaming and was wise enough to loan out Spider-Man to Disney/Marvel. Japanese business wisdom continues to seep into that company since they bought them in '89 when they were Columbia Pictures.

 

A more compelling argument I've heard of why we can't break stars anymore is not "poor quality actors" but the post internet media explosion broke the captive attention that theaters previously commanded. The Tom Cruises and Brad Pitts of the world are those guys because they're old school Gen-X'ers that rode that wave from crest to finish, and the rest is all victory rolls profiting off retro kicks or nostalgia.

 

Yes, to an extent. The movie star era ended when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and tainted his brand forever. Smith was probably the last true movie star that could "open" a plain 'ol movie and have it profit. Cruise pretty much tanked unless he was mining nostalgia and stunt porn from his old franchises or teaming up with Spielberg. Smith could still make something original and get hype from his name alone and didn't need nostalgia to keep him afloat. There are no more true movie stars that can carry an entire film across the box office finish line by themselves. You need teamup movies like Oceans 11 for guys like Clooney, Pitt and Damon to make any kind of dent financially. Damon can't bank unless he's playing Bourne. DiCaprio still needs Tarantino or Scorsese... again, it's all about teamups. Now stars have their little "niche" of fandom, but aren't solo global sensations like Ahnold, Sly and Willis were during peak 80s/90s. Modern stars need to wear tights and play a well known comic character to stand a chance with any kind of career worth a damn.

But I'm talking more about the level of talent, which I think is still there, but they are not being trained properly. Many of yesterday's stars had strong theater backgrounds, served in the military, or lead hard lives before breaking in, or took major chances playing different kinds of characters to stretch themselves. I feel like alot of new actors come from wealthy backgrounds, or are at the very least supported by their parents while they go on auditions, and their difficulties in life go about as far as some barista f'ing up their Starbucks order. Pitt and Depp were kind of like this, but they made up for it by being character actors and taking extreme chances in their performances. The Brad Pitt in Se7en has nothing in common with the Pitt in 12 Monkeys or Fight Club or Snatch. Depp's Jack Sparrow is worlds away from his turns in Platoon, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Blow, Sweeney Todd, etc... they stretched themselves to improve their craft. If Pitt and Depp were coming up in today's Hollywood, they would remain bland Netflix / CW types, as their "team" (agent, manager, publicist, entourage) would encourage them to play it safe. And nobody today is going to dare drop or gain 50 pounds to play a role like Deniro and Bale. It is just this safe, bland, Disneyland kind of era we're in right now. When's the last time you saw a movie like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club? Even if they make a movie or show with a daring premise, it's the bland, vanilla-soft-serve shit you see on Netflix or Hulu... like the algorithm version of "daring", which is just weird camera filters/angles and a hip soundtrack. The content itself remains as safe and inoffensive as ever.

Even old, well worn franchises like ALIEN are turning into teen slasher flicks with bubble gum casts. And don't get me started on the horror genre...

 

Yup, and The Mandalorian should have ended after one season. Andor is legit, but I fear they may try to squeeze baby Yoda in somehow into the second and final season.

 

They did plays... theatre actors tend to have pretty strong work ethic and know how to exude presence, since they have to play to the back of the room and even the cheap seats need to see what they're doing. I notice with alot of new actors, they're like deer in headlights. Like there is nothing going on behind the eyes. Or their rendering of character is very generic and one-note. John David Washington is a prime example... his dad Denzel was theatre trained. He exuded a kind of magnetic presence that you can still see today. It made it impossible not to look at him when he was onscreen... there was a ton of shit going on behind the eyes. One of the reasons I walked out of Creator was that John David doesn't have any of that... he came from sports... was on his way to a football career, but got cast in that show Ballers and started acting. He is bland and doesn't have the "it" factor and has a career because he is somebody's son. I just don't believe he embodies the characters he plays... which wouldn't be so bad if he had an ounce of charisma like his dad.

The new actors take acting classes like in Barry, but alot of those classes are only as strong as the teachers and the days of Adler, Strasberg and Stanislavski seem to be over. People like Brando, Beatty, Deniro, Pacino and Hoffman, Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, etc. came out of those schools, which were big on method acting. Method acting was controversial but undoubtedly effective. It's why Day-Lewis wins an oscar every time he acts. Method acting isn't as popular anymore, and I think it's because actors are less daring... safe spaces and shit have ruined alot of this. When's the last time you saw any new actor approaching Brando levels of talent? It just seems to be disappearing.

As with everything the explanation isn't simple and comes from several different places... some of it is the lack of hardship (alot of the older actors had shitty backgrounds, and newer talent is coming more and more from privileged backgrounds... the same thing is happening in sports), some of it is that movies aren't seen as that serious anymore so why should acting? some of it is Millenials and Gen Zers just have a different temperament and don't take as many chances. And charisma seems to be almost non-existant with the new actors... when's the last time you saw anybody approaching Clark Gable/George Clooney levels of magnetism? Alot of them are like deers in headlights.

Part of it is a divergence away from quality leading the box office. There was a time when the best movies made the most money. Look at the top ten box office movies from 1972:

1 The Godfather
2 The Poseidon Adventure
3 What's Up, Doc?
4 Deliverance
5 Deep Throat
6 Jeremiah Johnson
7 Cabaret
8 The Getaway
9 Last Tango in Paris
10 Lady Sings the Blues

Good acting was rewarded monetarily, which encouraged actors to continue doing the best they could... very little phoning in of performances. When you have a top ten box office comprised of super hero and event films, who gives a f**k about the acting? It's just not that rewarding to be "amazing" in front of a camera anymore. Not that actors don't try to be good, there's just little incentive for their careers to push themselves. This always leads to a drop in overall quality... for anything, not just movies.