Often, in discussions about old movies, someone will say, “That movie couldn’t be made today.”, and inevitably someone else will disagree.

  • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
    531·
    10 days ago

    Blazing Saddles.

    Probably the Blue Brothers, but for different reasons. I feel like most of the blues legends are gone.

      • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
        172·
        10 days ago

        any black-face media has been systematically removed from the internet. you can’t stream any episode of any show that has it. you can typically only watch that content on DVD.

        • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          11·
          10 days ago

          Hmm. Okay, I haven’t paid much attention to that. Although Tropic Thunder does seem to be available for streaming on several major platforms at the moment. Paramount, Amazon, Apple, Tubi, to name a few.

      • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        It really isn’t blackface though, in the sense that blackface is meant to be a caricature which diminishes black culture and behavior. The RDJ character was written as kind of the opposite - the “blackface” character is shown to be sane, courageous and even wise, while the actor playing the character is shown to be an out of touch Hollywood twat.

  • backalleycoyote@lemmy.today
    271·
    10 days ago

    Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, TMNT ‘89, Lord of the Rings.

    Whatever the JP franchise is now, it will never go back to full scale animatronics, and without Stan Winston’s magic, it’ll never be quite what the first (and a bit of the second) were.

    Cameron himself can’t recreate the magic of T2 even if his films make billions. He never risks having to “nail this in one shot” stunts.

    As for TMNT. Nobody gives a shit they’re suits, we could suspend our disbelief and watched mindblowing performances by great stuntmen in some of the most advanced animatronics ever. Michael Bay can’t even fathom how much better that is.

    The Hobbit was plagued by a lot of problems, but I don’t know if even Jackson could pull off the practical effects with digital overlay magic that was the first trilogy if he tried.

    That era of Hollywood, practical first, digital to enhance (sparingly) is gone it seems. It’s sad Hollywood has forgotten that that boundary pushing era was what made those films iconic. Rexy had weight, she literally tore a car apart. You can see the chaos of the semi landing in the canal. The turtles hit. The Riders of Théoden truly rode for ruin. Tell me you don’t get giddy when you know that scene is about to hit.

    • Dalvoron@lemmy.zipEnglish
      16·
      9 days ago

      Project Hail Mary was practical first. Real sets, real puppet, with digital enhancements. There is a scene that was filmed with loads of LEDs on wires to cover the shot in blinking red lights. I think it pays off hugely and the film is better for it all.

      At the moment I think it’s an outlier and most films will continue to just film green screens and tennis balls but it might herald the return of practical, maybe even full-scale animatronics! I can only hope.

      • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
        7·
        9 days ago

        I hope that film wins awards, genuinly good sci-fi made by people who understand movies and dont just fix it in post. It fealt real, the sinple trick of not having sound if the camera is not in a place with atmosphere is one of the most important little details. 2001 gets it right, Firefly gets it right, but if you can hear lazers in space, your just bring a wizard in 0g.

    • leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 days ago

      In the sequel of The Thing they first used animatronics and later replaced them with CG. I’m still angry about what could have been an awesome movie. With CG it looks just bad.

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      You know I was just thinking about this the other day. Netflix will put out their standard 10 hour “epic” and the world still manages to feel a tenth the size, and there will be a tenth of the action as any one of the three hour LOTR movies. It really makes me appreciate just how masterful those movies were, and how every artistic license they took with the original material feels more than justified.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    20·
    9 days ago

    Look up all the stunts Buster Keaton did, and shiver. Or The Little Rascals or Hal Roach’s Rascals, whatever they were called.

    Or the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet - while probably one of the best versions ever, nobody today would dare to think doing a movie like that today - it would be criminal.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    9 days ago

    Famously, you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today because they already made that move in the 70s

  • m4xie@lemmy.ca
    17·
    8 days ago

    My highschool physics teacher said the Nazis recorded X-ray video of Holocaust victims knees as they walked. Because MRI machines and other medical imagers aren’t large enough to walk around in, the films are still one of the best sources of how the bones actually move naturally under load in situ surrounded by the connective tissue.

    The radiation dose required to expose regular film at 24 frames a second killed the subjects.

    I really hope they don’t ever make movies like that again.

    • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
      191·
      10 days ago

      I showed this to my 16 year old nephew and he was legit upset/offended and I had to turn it off.

      He was shocked they could say ‘those bad words’ in a movie. I don’t dare show him Pulp Fiction.

      • chunes@lemmy.world
        23·
        10 days ago

        Sounds like he needs a cool uncle to counteract the excessive sheltering his parents are doing.

        • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
          7·
          10 days ago

          If you’ve grown up as a kid only having access to the internet in the last 6 years or so, yeah I could see how Idiocracy might be shocking. The dialog in that movie is the antithesis of the status quo nowadays. For a kid without context about the satirical and parodical nature of the film, they might think that the movie was endorsing that kind of language.

          It would take some guidance from a guardian on what it means, why its relevant, and why its actually become important over time.

          Its a required watch in my mind.

  • unitedwithme@lemmy.today
    192·
    10 days ago

    Team America. From the minds of South Park’s, Matt Stone and Trey Parker 😁.

    I think y’all know why.

      • unitedwithme@lemmy.today
        12·
        10 days ago

        Heck yeah, the unedited or “Not Rated” DVD version had the uncut scene where she defecates on his chest! Quite funny at the time, but I cannot imagine then doing something like that now, nor all the 9/11 jokes. Plus making fun of NK’s Jim Jong Il. I feel like you couldn’t really do that without stirring the pot at least a little bit.

        • FudgyMcTubbs@lemmy.world
          13·
          10 days ago

          Big disagree. It was outrageous then and it would be outrageous now. The southpark movie was fucking mindblowing when I saw it in the theater. Parker and Stone push boundaries, and it works for them every time. Theyre kind of American heroes in my book.

  • finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.worldEnglish
    162·
    10 days ago

    Birth of a Nation.

    Although Tarantino would probably try, so long as he could star in it alongside Samuel L Jackson, and call Samuel L Jackson the n-word ‘for the cinematographic art of it, really, it’s crucial to the film’. Because, aside from feet, that’s his fetish.

    • ProfThadBach@lemmy.world
      5·
      9 days ago

      I was gong to say Birth of a Nation but then I thought about who the American people elected and I changed my mind.

    • unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth
      4·
      10 days ago

      The General actually first bombed at the box office, leading to Buster Keaton being much more restricted in what he could do. Only later did it become a classic, deservedly so.

        • hansolo@lemmy.today
          21·
          9 days ago

          Functionally, it’s not exactly that far off from using AI to remove the clothes of someone. Just with no computers involved, and many more creeps.

          • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
            2·
            9 days ago

            Also, imagine the casting process.
            “We’re looking for a teenage girl who’s, like, really hot and willing to play a sexual role.”
            Jodie Foster and Kelly Preston, both 18 at the time, auditioned but they said “Nah, we’ll go with an underage actress instead. But then we’ll need a body double, so who among these applicants looks like a teenager in the nude the most?”

            • hansolo@lemmy.today
              3·
              9 days ago

              Oh no, Brooke Shields’s parents, specifically her mom, pimped her out relentlessly. She was peddled around NY and LA as jailbait. There’s some magazine cover that says something like “is it pedophilia or is it art?” Peddling straight up CP of pics of Brooke naked and like 14. It was specifically a national Brooke Shields creepiness.

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
    14·
    9 days ago

    Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. No way would a studio agree to do that much hand-crafted work. They’d just have the stars reacting to a bunch of tennis balls and “fix it in post.”