The '70s in film

[Jaicee]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Heh, as I said, our tastes in movies are pretty much the opposite.  These are the time periods I like for different types of media:

Movies: Late 70's and 80's. (already said)

Music: Late 60's and 70's.  The 80's were mostly a lull period, and then the 90's came back and were about as awesome as the 60's/70's.  There was some good indie music in the late 80's too, but almost no one was listening to it at the time (The Pixies, Sonic Youth, etc...).

Video Games: Late 80's and 90's.  Console gaming really became amazing in the late 80's and PC gaming came into it's own in the 90's.  Since then, gaming has had plenty of great games come along, but not as frequently as during the late 80's and 90's.

TV: Now.  Streaming services have caused a TV Renaissance.  They are all trying their best to deliver the best TV possible right now.

From what I can tell, you seem to like edgy/counterculture stuff in most media.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)  I kind of think we have similar tastes in music, because I like my music to be edgy including indie music.  For movies, I like to be hooked in with an original concept that is actually telling a timeless or universal story underneath.  This probably makes my taste in movies seem conservative.  For games, what I like most is easy to learn and simple to master (and there are some genres I like more than others: RPG, Strategy, Beatem up, etc...).  For TV, I am almost open to anything if it's done well enough, but I do tend to prefer comedies or something with a big budget.

The main constant for me is that I really like originality in every medium.  I tend to rank the first entry in a series higher than most people do.  For example, I like Star Wars better than Empire Strikes Back.  I really liked Suikoden 1, but I still haven't finished Suikoden 2.  I get bored really easily when I feel like I'm getting more of the same.  So my favorite time period for each of these media tends to be the one that I perceive as being both original and well done.

To answer your query (?), it just depends. Like my favorite new games released this year are Deadeus (better known as that new Game Boy game) and It Takes Two. The former could justifiably be classified as you suggest, but It Takes Two is both thematically and aesthetically a lot like a Pixar movie. I like media that I feel like was created for a purpose (even if that purpose is just for me to have fun) that is not simply to make money. I dislike superficiality. I guess that does often land me on countercultural sorts of material.

Maybe to more easily grasp what I'm saying, it might help to clarify that I don't feel that like offensiveness is valuable in and of itself. Like if it's something that's done as just a marketing strategy, I'm not there for it. Sometimes a movie or a game or what have you is created for the sole purpose of generating predictable negative press that the creators can cash in on by pretending to be victims. Like perhaps the creators can't afford to advertise much or generate other publicity, so in order to make money, they design their game/movie to be as offensive as possible so the press will give it the publicity they can't afford otherwise. That is a real marketing strategy that exists and I don't really view it differently from any other. If the quest for profit determined your design decisions, you're a sellout and you suck. This is why, for example, yeah lots of obscure, M-rated games rank in highly on my annual top 50 lists, but you won't find any AO-rated titles there, by contrast. (Sorry Postal, Ethnic Cleansing, Rape Lay, Hatred, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, etc.) I feel similarly about the NC-17 rating for films. That's not art, that's capitalism. Films like that wouldn't exist in a world without money. At least that's my view of it anyway. I just mention this to highlight the existence of a distinction in my mind between art that challenges and bullshit profit-driven schemes.

I think most good art does challenge you though, that much is true. Pushing boundaries, challenging established norms, and presenting new ideas is part of what makes art worth having in the first place to me. The most important thing though is that it be something you as the artist mean. If it's not sincere, it'll show. More than anything else, I love the raw humanity of authentic self-expression! I mean that will be true even if I don't agree with what you, the artist, are actually saying!

Last edited by Jaicee - on 12 May 2021