The Unseen Film Awards are going to take the same path that they followed in 2020 when covid forced the awards to skip awarding a prize for a movie and went int a different direction. In that year the award went to the Mads (Trace and Frank) for bringing joy to everyone who was locked inside by providing new riffs for everyone to enjoy. The award was the result of no one seeing the same films because everyone was locked up in quarantine.
This year the awards are going to other things than the best film. This is the result of my simply not having the bandwith to put the awards together. Too much is going on and I am being run ragged by trying to finish up my year end viewing and by a number of things in real life.
There were a couple of discussions about the awards with various people, some people wanting to know when they could send in their ballots, and some about whether it was even possible to do an awards this year. The discussions about possibility beyond my ability to tabulate votes stalled when it was realized that outside of Barbie and Oppenheimer most people honestly and truly haven’t seen remotely the same films. With the return of life before covid everyone is going in different directions so the result would probably be predetermined winners.
Talk then spun out as to what we could give awards to and a few ideas were tossed around. I then took those ideas and tossed them out to some of the normal voting body, but not all the usual suspects since I didn’t want to end up with an echo chamber. After a few days of discussion, we came up with not only a few winners of Unseen Film Awards but also sone winners of the Anti- Unseen Film Awards.
What are the Anti-Unseen Film Awards? They are some things that are really pissing us off. They are trends that are killing the souls of filmgoers everywhere.
The winners of the ANTI-UNSEEN FILM AWARDS are as follows.
THE TRUE DEATH OF ORIGINALITY IN HOLLYWOOD
Yea we all know that Hollywood has been eating it’s tale for decades with more and more sequels. However now we are being faced with yet more remakes, restarts and retreads. DC is trying to be relevant by redoing all of their superhero franchises with all new faces. We are getting an endless array of remakes, now not of old properties, but films only relatively new vintage. Hollywood is no longer giving us definite endings but with to be continued, even for stinker films. They aren’t pretending any more they are just giving us the same crap over and over again, and linking everything to a false nostalgia (I'm looking at you WONKA)
Worse they are trying to make everything look like everything else with the result everything new seems shop worn and half assed.
THE DEATH OF THE THEATRICAL WINDOW
The fact that mere days after opening in theaters most films are on VOD. Theaters are dying because most people feel that the there is no reason to see it in theater. Sure there are exceptions, but most things are in and out of theaters so fast that most people I know feel that if they don’t see a film on the first weekend they will just wait.
Added into this is that outside of the big films it’s no longer possible to plan on seeing a film past the first weekend because you don’t know if theaters are going to be playing after that. Schedules are not set. Even trying to plan seeing Godzilla Minus One in IMAX was a crap shoot since the theater managers I spoke with couldn’t be sure if they would have the film.
In the drive to make a fast buck studios are killing the theaters.
And now THE UNSEEN FILM AWARD FOR 2023
THE DEATH OF THE SUPERHERO
While we know that superhero films are making some money, it’s not like before. Everyone it seems is tiring of the same old same old and complete lack or originality. While we are getting some good moments, the films have stalled into superpowered people having the same fights over and over again, with no real fear of anyone dying because it’s comic and comic movies and no one dies because there is always going to be at least the promise of sequel. And without weight or danger no one cares. (And as such they are just waiting for streaming because they don't want to spend any money to see a bad movie before it's on TV the following week)
Worse because they have to go on the stories are compromised, compromised and convoluted as they have to keep the train rolling.
With so many of the same type of stories being dropped into theaters people have stopped caring.’
Thank god.
And while it will be a while before they crawl into their grave it seems the end is near and we are better for it.
BARBIE - FOR MAKING OPPENHEIMER A BILLION DOLLAR FILM AND MAKING MOVIES AN EVENT
The whole Babriehiemer thing made Christopher Nolan’s film a hit. I am absolutely certain that had the films not been linked OPPENHEIMER would have only made a fraction of what it did. But the whole see them both challenge made people want to go and engaged them. Going to the movies were, for a while at least, fun again.
JAPAN - FOR PROVING AMERICANS WILL READ SUBTITLES AND GO TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS
The success of GODZILLA MINUS ONE and THE BOY AND THE HERO effectively destroyed the Hollywood studio notion that films not in English won’t play in Peoria. Yes they will and we are better for it.
Yes RRR started the trend last year when it played to packed houses of non-Indian audiences across the country but the much too early trip to Netflix short circuited that.
The success of the two Japanese films is forcing Hollywood to sit up and take notice since what many thought would be a one and done trip to the theater is getting extended as people continue to go see the films pushing the home grown product out of the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment