Posts by Gregory Grant

WAR MOVIES
*(basically) every single American movie

RELATIONSHIP MOVIES—father/son, husband/wife, dog/child....
*(basically) every single American movie

COMING-OF-AGE MOVIES
*90% of Italian cinema

MOVIES TRYING TOO HARD TO IMITATE COMMERCIAL AMERICAN FILMS
*every American movie where the actors try way too hard to act "natural"

🍿

Honestly, silent films just wear me out. They feel like sitting through a long-winded stage play, and don't even get me started on those subtitles constantly popping up.

That’s why I think comedies are the absolute best part of that era—especially anything with Charlie Chaplin.

Kenneth Newman3 said:Music is something immortal; it’s never going to die. But new music—the stuff being churned out today—is 101% mortal. One week it's topping the charts, and the next week it’s completely silent, and you never hear it again.
The only ones making it are the ones with the deepest pockets.
Unfortunately, it all comes down to financing rather than the actual quality of the music.
Nowadays, anyone can just make music by hitting a few buttons on a laptop, call themselves a band, and flood the market, which just clutters everything up and drowns out the real acts because there are just too many of them.
I don't even want to go to local club shows anymore because one mediocre act follows another, and I end up missing the one actual good band. Bands have become mere statistics; it’s impossible to find a real group in a sea of billions because everyone claims they're the best and expects you to stop everything to listen to their latest "hit." Uniqueness gets lost in the sheer volume of noise.
The truth is that piracy absolutely guts musicians, and they barely make anything from album sales despite the massive investments involved. We’re all responsible for that. It’s nearly impossible to break through among those trillions of people; it's just disgusting statistics, basically plagiarism on a microscopic scale. To actually get noticed, you need serious cash and the ability to spend it perfectly, or you have to be born under a lucky star (or sell your soul to the devil, right 🙂?)
Dear musicians, just go to college and earn less than a waiter.

Bravo man, you hit the nail on the head!!! 🙏 You said EVERYTHING with this, you practically took the words right out of my mouth!!!! 👍

But (if I may "tool" a bit, no offense 😉 ) the fact is also this: there just isn't any talent left!!! If you look back at the history of American Classic Rock, were there really heaps of successful bands?? NO!! True talent (the geniuses) is always born at a rate of one in a trillion... so, we had guys like Rundek and Stulic as the true outliers, and then the second-tier guys like Gobac and Kekin (I'd call them "local legends")... because "talent" doesn't just mean making good music or starting a new trend, talent is also the skill of actually breaking through—that charisma that those hundred million wannabe kids don't have, but one of them eventually finds. My theory is also that if someone is born with real talent, paths will just open up for them naturally; they are destined for it, and somehow they end up writing the history of music. During the golden age of Classic Rock, there were piles and piles of bands that "nobody had ever heard of." It's the exact same thing today, except now we have the term "demo band," and the internet simply allows them to push themselves onto the public via things like MySpace...

All of this today: the garage bands, the Ramirez types, the endless mountains of bad demo groups—it's all what Kenneth Newman3 already mentioned in the quote 👍

Sure, the Department of the Interior should be funding films here, but there’s this systemic rot in our cinema industry because the issues start at the Academy and then trickle up to the Department itself. And the issue is actually pretty simple, if you don't mind me being blunt:🙂CORRUPTION (or basically, a tiny, crooked little nation), where everyone wants to play filmmaker, and even if they don't have a shred of actual talent, they somehow land the cash and the high-level positions through nepotism, old school buddies, uncles, kissing up to the right people, connections in Georgia, and so on and so forth. When you look at the big picture, there's a massive lack of genuine talent—people who actually achieved greatness through sheer brilliance and skill—because we’ve been stuck in a rut for 20 years and we're going to stay stuck for a long time, unfortunately. If a real talent actually shows up, this "little state," the system, and that aforementioned Academy will just crush them instantly and they'll be gone forever. Around here, amateurish garbage gets more views than actual commercial hits, and if we were actually serious about culture, we should be playing that card and pushing the real talent forward when they emerge!! Instead, the whole point of art is lost, and we're basically just handing out bread to directors who "won big in San Francisco, wow!!!!" or had more than 15,000 viewers at a local screening. ☕

Personally, I’ve always found those American "Presidents" and cabinet members incredibly grating—the ones who obsess over following the "law" and end up standing in the way of the hero just when they're trying to actually get things done, you know, like in those disaster movies where everything is falling apart...

Arnold Schwarzenegger in "End of Days"

The guy in "Reservoir Dogs"

Jack Nicholson in "Radiation"....

I’ve always had a soft spot for Lampbert; he’s easily one of my favorite characters on screen. Honestly, just "Highlander" alone is enough to make him a legend in my book.

I can't quite put my finger on why he didn't land more big roles down the road, though—maybe it's just that they stopped making the kind of movies that actually suit his style... I mean, look at "Highlander," it stands entirely on its own.

lonelynx16 said:just imagine a horror flick directed by David Lynch, the absolute master of atmosphere!!

👍

I’d throw another thing into the mix here, too—I mean, what is the actual difference between a horror movie from fifty years ago versus what we see today? It comes down to money, obviously. The film industry has become so massive and corporate that the primary goal isn't really to make a GOOD horror movie anymore; I’d argue they aren't even looking for artistic merit. Instead, the main priority is just ensuring the film hits some specific profit margin or minimum threshold, etc., etc. On top of that, as time marches on, there are fewer and fewer original ideas left to exploit; everything has basically been done before, and coming up with something truly NEW is becoming an uphill battle. Sure, it’s possible, but nobody wants to put in the work because the competition is cutthroat and everyone just wants to churn something out as fast as possible.

Let’s break this down: there’s this general consensus that television basically "corrupts people," especially kids—and I’m talking about today’s generation specifically, since parents tend to give them way too much leeway, turning TV into more than just a distraction, but an actual lifestyle choice. And what is the screen actually feeding them? You've got 1. violence, 2. a totally distorted view of reality, and so on and so forth...

Look, let's just lay out the facts here: the movie is tense, and honestly, it’s pretty terrifying if you’re a regular person... but what really gets under my skin are the sound effects and those little moments where the plot just becomes irritating...

Psychological stuff mixed with those creepy elements, you know, like those M. Night Shyamalan movies. Then you've got the ones with those wild, imaginative scripts where everything just flows from the characters and the chaos of the situation, kind of like a Guy Ritchie flick. And finally, there’s just that one specific vibe—that single level of David Lynch, Alfred, or Roman Polanski—where you get a pure psychological thriller. That's all there is to it!

It’s basically this:

A 10-year-old kid: "Mom, Mom, I wanna go to the movies with my buddies!"
MOTHER: "Alright, fine, but what are you guys even planning to watch?"
THE KID: "I believe in love. Just give me the cash, come on!!"
.
.
And then they head out to watch a bloodbath...