I feel like this kind of thing happens whenever any new art form or genre (or whatever term makes the most sense) starts capturing the popular imagination, and it's poo-pooed by the old guard of either critics or artists. Maybe it just feels particularly intense right now because this current iteration of the internet…

Not that they came out as frequently, but I wonder if people were asking well respected directors their thoughts on Bond movies or Disney farces in the 70s?

I don't know if it's so much not being able to discern quality from shit as much as some movies just become major cultural things, so you can't participate in basic social interaction with the people around you until you've taken part. Although in the case of Angry Birds, iirc, that had more to do with just everything…

What is the view that's taken seriously?

After I responded the first time, I decided to maybe look up some 2016 box office numbers, and… they make for some dismal reading. Considering how much crap was actually produced and how much money they earned, I may have to rescind some of my earlier thoughts. How in the world did Angry Birds do so well?

Yeah, I suppose that's fair. Not that much has made number one this year unless it was associated with Star Wars, Marvel, or DC. That said, I do think some other kind of metric should probably be used now (or technically, a couple of years prior to now) because of streaming and the comparative increase in the price of…

Musicals as a genre, westerns as a genre, and hard-boiled detective/mystery movies as a genre (although that gave a little more freedom for flourishes of style). And yeah, there were definitely more auteurs in general, but the studios have had a system since the 40s designed for cranking out some pretty standardized…

You should try to marathon AMC some time in the near future. The whole reason these guys became famous auteurs is because the film industry was, for decades, studio processed exercises in box ticking blandness (outside of Hitchcock getting away with his thing and Welles being excommunicated so he would stop doing his…

FWIW, I thought about leaving it off the list. But if Gremlins counts, then so does Iron Man at least

Outside of the marketing bit, though, I feel like that kind of thing is still going on, at least in my neck of the woods. I see mid-budget, more cerebral movies staying in the theaters for around a month, sometimes 2 or 3 if they're especially successful (outside of the mental wasteland that is the summer movie scene,…

Were they eagerly attended though, or is that just nostalgia putting a tinge on things? If you look at box office numbers (adjusted for inflation), you could make a case for The Graduate getting a huge audience, maybe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well. But the vast majority of top grossing movies, reaching…

I'll grant that there was more of that stuff being produced, but I don't think guys like Scott and Scorsese are going for mid-budget films right now. Scott wants to continue producing big, brainy sci-fi blockbusters, whereas it seems like Scorsese is very interested in lavish period pieces lately.

Scott simply bemoans that “cinema mainly is pretty bad” these days. He hopes to continue making “smart films,” but he’s also concerned that the general dumbification of the movie industry will eventually prevent him from doing that

Comic book movie studios should offer him something like the Punisher or Dorian Chase era Vigilante, tell him he can do whatever he wants with the character with no tie-in to the other movies if he chooses, then see what he says

One might say it relies on the thin, gossamer tightrope of one's ability to perceive the non-reality of any situation to understand the realism in the reality

2017 is now the worst!

You'd also have to ignore how Scott's head gets blown off in Regeneration and is restored in Reckoning without fuss. But we are talking about soldiers being brought back from the dead and/or cloned, so… I guess none of it is beyond reason by Reckoning

There would definitely be something related to "the PC Police", "safe spaces", and/or "telling it like it is" in any response

Their campaign never cared about consistency across their fictions, much less providing anything like the facts. Why stop now?

She wanted to live like common people and do whatever common people do?