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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
this is possible the worst era for film, but by comparison look at tv. it's like all the talented people got tired of the studio bullshit and got hired by HBO. the past decade or so has been a sort of golden age of television.
the 90s had "indie" movies to save the day, but then the indie movie got gobbled up as a formula and now you have a bunch of predictable shit as well.
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It's the same point porkie makes and I agree. the decline of Hollywood has certainly marked an upturn in US television. I think there are industrial factors that help explain that, namely that in the 80s (I think) the Hollywood screenwriters union agreed to abandon artistic control for a better pay structure, making screenwriters entirely replaceable. Basically contractors.
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About the 80s, it was a lot of dumb shit, as the people who boomed in the 70s got replaced by shitheads like spielberg and zemeckis.
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Yeah, Spielberg and Lucas offered a new way for Hollywood to think about its product: promote like made, catch the youth audience, bombard them with spectacle.
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the movie proclaimed as "best" of the 80s (raging bull) came out in... 1980! all downwards from there, until sex lies and videotape, while not a great movie in itself, sparks some kind of hope, but disney promptly buys miramax in 93 and everything goes to shit in the late 90s-- which is when tv starts to get good (buffy, the west wing, sopranos).
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The 80s also saw the rise of a popuilar brand of European cinema, stuff like Betty Blue, Jean de Florette, Diva, etc, which continued on with the rise of directors like Pedro Almodovar. None of these were particularly challenging in themselves but they managed, along with the indies you mentioned, to target a key area neglected by Hollywood: namely an intelligent adult audience.
As an aside, it's sad that a film now described as being 'adult' tends to refer to it being pornographic. Films like Grand Hotel, My Darling Clementine or High Noon are 'adult' not because they showed an excess of muff but because they dealt in ideas not readily accessible to children.