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That’s a very fair comment.

As I sit here in my Parlour, DVD rack to my left, Blu-ray Discs on the mantle piece, and no less than 6 streaming services, it can be hard to remember that as a kid, movies were typically something I had to wait to air on TV, or perhaps at a friend’s birthday party.

We did eventually get a VHS Player (around 1987/88) but tapes were flipping expensive, so again became relegated to Birthday/Christmas presents, and periodic rentals in the colder months. Sure I could record something, but it had to air first.

So stuff like Indiana Jones became quite big draws. At school, you’d find out or share when it was airing. Your friends might even pile round someone’s house to watch it together.

And in the U.K., you always hoped the BBC would have the airing rights, so you didn’t have to put up with adverts, and instead watch it in one sitting.

The upside was daytime TV usually put a film on to fill the schedule. Nothing modern, but that’s how I discovered Doug McClure and Harry Hausen movies etc.

 Easy E wrote:
I did not read the whole thread, but there is also the fact that everyone saw them on ABC's Sunday Night Movie; and then everyone talked about them the next day.

Now-a-days, there are very few films that can become a cultural touchstone BECAUSE no one is watching the same media.

Back in the day, everyone watched either the ABC Sunday Night Movie or the NBC Sunday Night movie. There was not much else to watch!

Murder She Wrote!

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Murder She Wrote!

It took a long time before people realized she was the one doing all the murdering.

She got away with it, too, by disappearing those meddling kids and their dog.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ve never understood why Temple of Doom is so poorly thought of. It’s probably my favourite of the bunch.

It's Willie and Short Round.

They are loud.

They are constantly having lines ADR'd in.

They are constantly quipping.

They are constantly screaming.

They are obnoxious.

They are distracting.

They are loud.

Temple of Doom is a migraine headache machine and it's all their fault.

It's plot also just isn't as good as the 1st and 3rd films. Like really. It's just a weaker plot. Even without all the issues with the annoying side characters, it still wouldn't be as good as the other two OG films.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
That’s a very fair comment.

As I sit here in my Parlour, DVD rack to my left, Blu-ray Discs on the mantle piece, and no less than 6 streaming services, it can be hard to remember that as a kid, movies were typically something I had to wait to air on TV, or perhaps at a friend’s birthday party.

We did eventually get a VHS Player (around 1987/88) but tapes were flipping expensive, so again became relegated to Birthday/Christmas presents, and periodic rentals in the colder months. Sure I could record something, but it had to air first.

I remember passing through eastern Montana in the... hmmm... the mid 90s. Stopped at a Pizza Hut in some small town that probably had a name, as the rest of the state was basically most of a day's drive by itself (and then Idaho and finally on to my destination), and I overheard the waitresses' talking as I walked in:

"There was a movie on TV last night!"

That stuck with me, as I didn't expect the small town I was heading towards to be much different. (It was a bit better, but my car was quickly bright green from all the corn fields, which stretched as far as the eye could see.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
She got away with it, too, by disappearing those meddling kids and their dog.

For peak Murder, She Wrote silliness, may I recommend Pushing Up Roses on YouTube. She does breakdown summaries of MSW episodes, and I find them highly entertaining. They’re not being mean about the show, but revelling in its inherent silliness.

I think every decade gets a really good adventure film, and that's the one for the folks from the 80s. The 90s got The Mummy, and the 2000s got National Treasure. I'm drawing a blank for the 2010s. Much like heist movies, whichever one you see first becomes your gold standard for the others of its genre.

I’d argue the later Jumanji films come from much the same mold. So those would cover the 2010’s.

If you enjoyed them. Which I for one did, but can appreciate they might lack the same universal appeal as Indy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another thought has bubbled up from the foetid morass of my mind.

Like many Dakkanauts, I grew up in the Star Wars/Indy world. Whilst I predate some entries, they’ve functionally always been part of my life, and I grew up with them.

But, Dakkanauts of similar vintage will also have grown up with the Internet. And so those films were also part of early internet culture - particular once DVD came out, and we had access to director commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries etc.

And so that era of films, and their fans, were the bedrock of early internet discourse and dare I say, media literacy, in those fans. The first time we really had the resources and sounding boards to dig into why we loved them.

IMDB has a list for 2010s, and its dominated by the various big franchises.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls083229144/

I certainly enjoyed a lot of the films on that list.

In my opinion, Kingsman has a good claim to being a pretty iconic adventure film from that period. Its even derivative of other adventure properties from previous eras

 Captain Joystick wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ve never understood why Temple of Doom is so poorly thought of. It’s probably my favourite of the bunch.

It's Willie and Short Round.

Yes. Short Round is supposed to be a Chinese street kid, but if he were, he'd have devoured the entire Indian buffet and asked for seconds. Kid acted like he was raised in Malibu.

As for Willie...Spielberg was hosting her on the casting couch and later married her, but for everyone else, she's grating and annoying.

 Gitzbitah wrote:
I think every decade gets a really good adventure film, and that's the one for the folks from the 80s. The 90s got The Mummy, and the 2000s got National Treasure. I'm drawing a blank for the 2010s. Much like heist movies, whichever one you see first becomes your gold standard for the others of its genre.

Would The Book of Eli fufull the conditions of great adventure film for the 2010s? I personally remember it fairly fondly.

There's definitely adventure films, but I can think of few in the mold of Indiana Jones since the 90s. That kind of purposefully pulpy fiction, made in the styles and manners of serial works from the Depression and post-war periods, just isn't something that gets made much anymore.

It’s specifically family friendly adventure for me that’s rare.

Many are made for kids. Adults get outright thrillers.

But “something for everyone” films are rarer. We could look to Journey to the Centre of the Earth starring Brendan Fraser. That is of course another adaptation of the Jules Verne classic. And indeed its sequel, Journey 2 with The Rock. Been ages since I saw them, but I think they might fit the bill.

The problem with making "something for everybody" movies is that if you goof up, you've accidentally made a "nothing for anybody" movie.

True, which in its own way may very well explain their relative scarcity.

Either too much for a risk adverse studio, or so hard to get right, many simply sink without grace into the morass of Direct to Streaming drivel etc.

It might also be because of some generational change.

Don't forget dads today aren't the same as they were 20-30 years ago. So the style of film that they consider family is different to then.

They are far more likely to day to consider a fantasy/sci-fi/comicbook film "family" friendly and such.



Furthermore it might also be that fewer families are going to the cinema and that its teens and young adult groups that are more dominant.

Thus it could just be that your traditional "family" film is changing its spots and also that its not as much in demand and thus what we are getting is different (and we might not think of them as family films) and there is just less of it.




I think the argument that if you mess it up you've a film for no one is the same no matter if you make a general family film or one for a niche. A niche film that's mucked up won't fit the niche and won't interest people from outside the niche to even bother considering the film.
So it still ends up a film for nobody

Also very much true. Tolerances have shifted as cinema continues to push and prod away at boundaries.

Now I’ll freely identify as a filthy minded Gore Hound. I like a bit of the Cinematic old Ultra V, and I’ll award even objectively awful movies extra points for inventive kills, even if the effects behind that kill are dodgy.

And yes. Cinema is getting more explicit in terms of violence as the years and decades creep by.

Indeed. To quote Sheila Brovlawski in South Park, The Movie?

Horrific, deplorable violence is OK, so long as nobody says any naughty words.

 LordofHats wrote:
There's definitely something to be said that quality practical effects and sets just age better than CGI.

Like, Jurassic Park comes to mind too. There is some bad CGI in a few places that hasn't aged well but also a lot of practical stuff that still looks great.

Alien the original to, and the first three Indiana Jones movies. The Thing. The more time goes on in the age of CGI (and I don't hate CGI) the more appreciation I have for the way the limits of physical work impact the way a movie is made and presented.

It feels more authentic even if it doesn't always look as fantastic.

I would like to mention something about practical effects. The remake/prequel to The Thing was originally supposed to use practical effects for the monsters, then they did make them. They made them, and shot all the scenes with them. Then in post-production they CGIed over them. I'm not opposed to CGI touchups or slight adjustments, but it was total replacement. I've seen the original footage, and it was somehow creepier, and should have been used.

 cuda1179 wrote:
I would like to mention something about practical effects. The remake/prequel to The Thing was originally supposed to use practical effects for the monsters, then they did make them. They made them, and shot all the scenes with them. Then in post-production they CGIed over them. I'm not opposed to CGI touchups or slight adjustments, but it was total replacement. I've seen the original footage, and it was somehow creepier, and should have been used.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. CGI had a ton of potential and it has generally been a net negative. Adversity creates the conditions for greatness while ease breeds mediocrity.

Pre-CGI films had to be far more conscientious about what they chose to show and they also typically had one take to get it right. What that meant was that the visual effects were paired with higher-quality acting and storytelling, because one isn't going to waste a $1 million shot on a movie with lame dialogue.

By the way, this applied to all films of that era. "White Nights," which is a now a forgotten dance film, features the crash of an actual 747 - they had one plane, and one take. Why? To make the film feel real, and therefore compelling. It worked.

Roger Ebert once declared the air assault sequence from "Apocalypse Now" to be the best battle scene ever recorded on film. He's still correct. Real aircraft, real pyrotechnics and ONE TAKE. No post-production "let's just redo the whole thing."

Also - actors perform better on real sets than in front of green screens.

Heck the Red Dwarf intro scene from Red Dwarf has aged really well because it was all practical effects. In a series which is full of cheaper effects and a shoe-string-like budget feel the practical ship effects still stand strong today over cheap CGI


I think also whilst we can hyper detailed with CGI there's often a case of things feeling "floaty".
I noticed that the building explosions in the end of The Quick and the Dead were really impactful. Something about them really hit harder than a whole transformers film chock full of explosions.


I think its not just the nature of CGI VS reality but also the fact that CGI can let you do something that's insanely expensive but copy-paste it so often that you can become cheap with them. Things can lose impact.

old CGI also suffers from not being laid down on the same film stock at the same time as the rest, so as things age and deteriorate in defferent ways they fit together less and less well

you can see similar effects when a film got a major re-shoot after the first focus group showings with the new material blending in ok on the films release, but 10 years later it sticks out as very clearly different

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


Roger Ebert once declared the air assault sequence from "Apocalypse Now" to be the best battle scene ever recorded on film. He's still correct. Real aircraft, real pyrotechnics and ONE TAKE. No post-production "let's just redo the whole thing."

Also - actors perform better on real sets than in front of green screens.

Back when they filmed The Fellowship of the Ring, how the Balrog would look like on film was deliberately held back from the public and trailers, to make it suitably impressive and impactful when it made its entrance in the movie. In an interview before general release, some journalists tried to pry Sir Ian McKellen how it looked, to which he famously replied that it was small, yellow, round and on the tip of a broomstick, because they did it in CGI totally, and he never once saw anything of it before viewing the finished movie for himself. That's one of the things that stuck with me over the years - you need to be hell of a good actor to take the scene seriously when your monstrous opponent is a tennis ball they're waving around to give you an idea where the face of the CGI beast will eventually be...

I don’t mind CGI, but I do take exception to crap CGI.

Early stuff not ageing well doesn’t bother me, as, well, it’s early stuff.

Plus it leads to lazy hacks making bloody awful films. Think drivel like Sharknado. Those only exist because of CGI, and require little to no thought or effort.

Consider. You want to make a monster movie of some kind, and you only have practical effects to realise it. Puppetry, costumes, animatronics, stop motion, mattes etc are all at your disposal.

Now those aren’t without their limits. And as a film maker, you need to obey those limits, or like The Thing, come up with interesting ways to push those limits, and film around any cut corners.

This in turn makes you really think about your scene, and whether it’s really needs to be shot.

With CGI? You can just film an empty corridor, and animate whatever you want.

The limits and demands of practical effects are what make the likes of Alien so good. When you see the on-set photos of the starbeast, the suit is clearly heavy, cumbersome and stifling. And honestly? Not as good as you might think.

This was of course compensated for with strictly limited glimpses, and clever lightning. And the film works because of those choices and necessities.

If it was just done in CGI? It could well have ruined it. I’m not saying CGI = Hack Director by default, but it can remove tough choices in film making, and that can be to the detriment of a movie.

Use it where its impact is best seen. Think the final fight in Endgame, with the portals and gathering forces. Or the sweeping battle shots of Lord of The Rings.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


The limits and demands of practical effects are what make the likes of Alien so good. When you see the on-set photos of the starbeast, the suit is clearly heavy, cumbersome and stifling. And honestly? Not as good as you might think.

This was of course compensated for with strictly limited glimpses, and clever lightning. And the film works because of those choices and necessities.

In the case of Alien and the wider Alien franchise, it is also done by extremely demanding physical work from stuntpeople that are often recruited from ballet dancers, gymnasts or other lines of work that require extreme mastery over the body. The original suit was piloted by one Bolaji Badejo, at the time exchange student, who was picked for his extreme body type after Ridley Scott randomly met him in a pub:



There's an interesting trivia article about the various actors that played the Xenomorph over the years: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/alien-xenomorph-actor

That is the best ending to a “guy in the pub asked if I’d like to be in a movie” story.

Tsagualsa wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


Roger Ebert once declared the air assault sequence from "Apocalypse Now" to be the best battle scene ever recorded on film. He's still correct. Real aircraft, real pyrotechnics and ONE TAKE. No post-production "let's just redo the whole thing."

Also - actors perform better on real sets than in front of green screens.

Back when they filmed The Fellowship of the Ring, how the Balrog would look like on film was deliberately held back from the public and trailers, to make it suitably impressive and impactful when it made its entrance in the movie. In an interview before general release, some journalists tried to pry Sir Ian McKellen how it looked, to which he famously replied that it was small, yellow, round and on the tip of a broomstick, because they did it in CGI totally, and he never once saw anything of it before viewing the finished movie for himself. That's one of the things that stuck with me over the years - you need to be hell of a good actor to take the scene seriously when your monstrous opponent is a tennis ball they're waving around to give you an idea where the face of the CGI beast will eventually be...

I loved the Harrison Ford interview before The Force Awakens where they bribed them for spoilers for the new Star Wars movie. Ford pockets the money, leans in, “I hear they’re making one.”

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


If it was just done in CGI? It could well have ruined it. I’m not saying CGI = Hack Director by default, but it can remove tough choices in film making, and that can be to the detriment of a movie.

I think it already has has ruined films. You can watch a whole city block getting vaporized and it's totally "meh."

That's because we've all seen it dozens of times. In fact, we keeps seeing more of it, because why not?

The point of "hiding the monster" was that they couldn't make anything nearly as scary or reality-breaking as what the audience could imagine. That made for better films.

Similarly, if you have only enough money for one really impressive scene, you absolutely have to build up to it.

Use it where its impact is best seen. Think the final fight in Endgame, with the portals and gathering forces. Or the sweeping battle shots of Lord of The Rings.

I'm one of the few who think Peter Jackson's movies came close to true greatness, but because he couldn't resist stupid dwarf jokes, second-guessing Tolkien, and using too much CGI when he didn't need it, he made them merely mediocre.

Remember: if the Rohirrim were only 20 minutes late, the Scrubbing Bubbles of Death would have killed all the orcs and Theoden would have had lunch in the White Tower without getting his armor dirty.

Clover field did it well I think for precisely the reasons mentioned above. Even though the monster was the size of a building, you spent most of the film just seeing glimpses. They did massive damage, but it always felt quite claustrophobic as the films focus was right down on just a few people that didn’t know what was going on.