[Weekly Update] August 22, 2022

We are still one week behind our schedule. Hopefully things will go back to normal soon. In the meantime, what movies have you watched recently?

CHANNEL UPDATE

Our video on the Mothra trilogy is currently being edited. The video will be about how each film learns from the last one, and how they fail and succeed at being a children's film.

There's no real spoiler in the film, but these are not really movies that can be spoiled. Still, watching the movies before hand will make the video a bit easier to follow. It's up to you, though. They aren't great movies, to be honest.

We'll be talking about RRR after this. I'm still looking for a unique angle to approach this film, as I'm not entirely familiar with Indian culture, not enough to do detail analysis.

My current plan is to use the film to talk about Indian film culture, and perhaps talk about why cinema in India continues to thrive, when so many other film industry struggled and failed when facing Hollywood.

Afterward, I'll have to watch a bunch of bad Jackie Chan movies so... wish me luck.

MEDIA TALK

Do you have a feeling that Hollywood is kinda in a mess right now? It's like, film discourse lately has been consistently about mediocre or even failing Hollywood projects: Batgirl being completely scrapped; Flash actor being arrested; Lightyear is so bad it was forgotten in a week; Jurassic World Dominion is just flat out awful; It's Morbin' time.

We are in August right now, and there's has yet to be a movie released that captures the cultural attention. Prey comes closest to living a mark in film history, but I don't think it'll leave much of an impression in the long run.

Movie's good, though. You should watch it.

There's negativity in the air for the past few years, and the audience is getting more and more cynical. That's definitely a big part of the reasons why things feel that way. Even widely loved films like Spider-Man: No Way Home gets called "the worst Spider-Man movie ever" by a very vocal minority. And our attention is focused a lot more on Matrix Resurrection, instead of Ghostbusters Afterlife. We are fascinated by Hollywood's incompetence, to a point where every movie is either the best, or the worst, with no in-between.

At the same time, Film studios continue to merge and being bought. Sometimes it feels like the people in charge were there to scrape off whatever is left in the industry before the apocalypse arrives. The less studios left, the less risk taking they become, and the film gets less and less interesting.

When I think about all the recent movies I watched: Uncharted, The Gray Man, The Man from Toronto. All of my reviews are exactly the same: A bit formulaic but well done. This is kinda how I feel about Hollywood, right now. The industry has gotten so good at producing what is expected.

And this is exactly what the Hong Kong film industry looks like, before it collapsed. A whole decade of similar but well done movies grinds the market's interest away, until one day, it all vanished.

I wonder if Hollywood will do the same? If that happened, it'll leave a lot more room for American indie films to shine, that's for sure. It's not necessary a bad thing.

Anyway, what's some recent good movies you've seen? And if you answer is "Everything Everywhere All at Once"... yeah, I get you.

Anyway, time to get back to work. I'll see you in a few days with a new video!