im not going to pretend US culture was ever anything so high as to be able to experience ‘decline’. film sucks, art sucks, mostly because capitalism fucks it up but some of it don’t work in ideal conditions either
we’ve never had communism. why do we need to fetishise art from a capitalist past with the same conditions making it awful that make it awful today?
directly compare 2019 with 1994.
2019 awful films: joker, endgame, once upon a hollywood, spirderman 2, captain marvel, star war 10, the irishmen, it 2, glass, lion king, aladdin, klaus, the king, alita, dark pheonix, dead don’t die, cats, ma, escape room, men in black…4?, 6 underground,
lets peruse the complete shit 94 shat out: Forest Gump, the Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura, Ed Wood(fight me), Santa Clause, The Crow, the Flintstones, Naked Gun iii, bottle rocket, junior, street fighter, beverly hills cop iii, mighty ducks 2, the next karate kid, leprechaun 2, city slickers 2.
this is not close to extensive, these are films millions of people watched and some millions quite liked or thought was decent.
i don’t think i’ve ever been accused of neoliberalism for watching way too many movies before but that’s a good bit
i am begging you to test this hypothesis and going and watching every release from [any period in the past] not just the ones which are beloved enough to warrant rereleases and streaming contracts. film is a graveyard of creative bankruptcy and low effort exploitation.
even the USSR has a backcatalogue of cheap imitation and trendfollowing bullshit
a culture notably devoid of market forces circa 1992.
don’t get me wrong most of what comes out now is still horseshit, it just used to be too. collective memory separates the chaff and gives people an incomplete picture of whatever era they’re nostalgia-ing
it was different before! it was more artistic 20 years ago!
:thonk: which is what they were saying 20 years ago. and 20 years before that. Snobs have been complaining about lowbrow pushing out highbrow since like, the advent of the talky. And then in a couple decades it gets reappraised as ‘oh that schlock we were hating on is actually Super Art and the shit coming out now doesn’t compare’.
But they can never talk about why this is, even though its obvious and has been the same fucking process the entire time. Hollywood has always always always been about getting asses in seats, never artistic achievement. You want to see what artist-lead film is go back in time to the fucking Soviet Union.
God these nostalgia hogs make me sick
id prefer a good actor with a strange affect to an authentic-but-awful american tbh.
the american? actors in that movie were soooo bad. it hurt to watch.
the dam part is perfectly feasible.
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin … Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:
then there’s the fact we’ll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause—the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they’re gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it’d be a shame to not build great monuments down here
it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry
NAWAPA but 20x as expensive and destructive. I love it.
gotta always get that fucking jab in there eh?
capital guts pensions and forced retirement to be financialised, so now every finance evil thing can also get blamed on the slightly better off workers with unions and benefits. fucking manufactured crab and bucket bullshit