As the title suggests, so forth.
The Way of All Flesh
It’s been thirteen years since Avatar was released, and here comes the sequel. That is a preposterous delay, but one of the most interesting things for me is that it pinpoints a seachange that I missed because of my general checking out of the MCU. At one point in the 2010s it seemed like 3-D was the defaut mode for blockbusters. Not real properly planned and photographed 3-D of course, just post-production conversion. There was a time when I had to carefully scan the cinema listings so I could boycott 3-D, and its outrageous surcharge, and just see films in glorious 2-D. And, because I stopped going to see the increasingly bland Marvel movies and their ilk, I didn’t notice when it happened but clearly that situation flipped, and suddenly most screenings were 2-D again, and it was 3-D screenings you had to seek out. I would like to think that some of this was simply people voting with their feet, but equally with Disney’s monopoly/monopsony power it could simply be that they dropped 3-D conversion because with their increasing affinity for last-minute CGI VFX there simply was no finished product to convert. And so everybody had to adjust to that, studios and audiences alike. In the same way that the 2010s have seen audiences inured to sloppy fight editing, vague and incomprehensible action sequences, with frankly embarrassing CGI blighting all. But for a whole generation that’s normal; cinema is CGI capes that look crap.
Unseen & Unheard
Talking of things that are frankly embarrassing, ahem, my first reaction to seeing Vertigo toppled in the Sight & Sound poll because of incredibly obvious vote-rigging was to laugh out loud. I don’t have much time for the Sight & Sound poll, so I’m not hugely invested in defending its integrity. I genuinely feel it’s sheer good luck that Vertigo ever got the accolade. Back in 2012 I was just nonplussed by the results. I felt that people weren’t genuinely voting on what they thought were the greatest films of all time after much thought and prayer. They weren’t even voting for their own personal favourite films in a spirit of adorable idiosyncracy. They were not voting for anything they actually liked or thought good, but voting with an eye to impressing other people, to try and outdo other critics with their obscure choices in a spirit of too cool for film school. At the time I said the amount of silent films that had popped up was akin to someone saying I love the theatre but it’s all been downhill since they stopped wearing the masks. A statement that would not make it immediately obvious that this person actually does love the theatre. And this time round the process has been even more transparently absurd. But who cares? Whatever the intention was, it has surely backfired.
Talking Movies 