Skip to main content

Netflix, Marvel, Brexit – and Weinstein: how this decade radically reshaped cinema’s heroes and villains

Hollywood’s monsters were exposed, streaming services embraced auteurs and ‘motion smoothing’ made the movies look like daytime TV

The long decade closes with no consensus on what we were supposed to call it (the “teens”?) nor about what ground has been gained or lost in the big cinema debates of the past 10 years. Steven Spielberg warned of a colossal evolutionary crisis in theatrical distribution, whereby the film business becomes over reliant annually on three or four big “tentpole” movies that will then crash, leaving us with the movie equivalent of 2008 or even 1929. And the tentpoles that everyone is betting on are the superhero films, which Spielberg warned will go the way of the western. Well, this hasn’t happened yet.

So a new hero/villain has arisen: Marvel Studios, which has enjoyed a staggering explosion of box-office popularity, blessed by cinema chains for providing surefire hits, but increasingly loathed by cinephiles for dumbing down the movies. Martin Scorsese, in his widely shared New York Times article, expanded his personal view that superhero films are just glorified theme-park rides without the individual artistry and humanity of real cinema.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QpLyBA
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more