10 Movie Events That Shaped the Decade (For Movie Fans)

[EricJ]

Originally Posted by Diesel

And there is (almost) always going to be someone out there who will pay to see it.

Don't think it's that they're "sick" enough to see it, just that they don't apply much thought to the reasons they think the momentary rush of seeing something "extreme" is so Cool.

For comparison, I was going to suggest that one other sociological trend we saw coming out of the Oughties was the rise of "Zombie Chic":
I can appreciate that the "Dawn of the Dead" remake was Because We Can, "I Am Legend" wanted to borrow pretentious clothes because Will Smith wasn't feeling Cool enough that week, and "Fido" and "Shaun of the Dead" had satirical fish to fry...But when we get to something like "Zombieland", you run into a movie that both thinks it was the Definitive movie of its appeal, and was convinced it was the first to come up with its idea.
Coming out of the frustration of the Bush era, into a helpless undefined era we didn't know, it seemed like we had a lot of ADD-aged audiences that wished for a world where you could deal with a difficult situation by whipping out a sawed-off heavy-gauge weapon and messily blowing the head off of the person who was immediately bothering you...But since that would be Bad, to explain it away with a bravely persecuted underground resistance against the entire world, where you can look cool and get points for picking off a segment of the population Born to be Targets.

Basically, we have a generation that is so scared of their own personal inabilities to deal with other human beings in the world around them, they'd rather see something cool and violent happen to them, just to shut them up and look funny....Preferably something happen to them, so you can remain an innocent spectator.
To which we can throw in the "Cool public self-humiliation video" Jackass culture of the 00's as well.

[assydingo]

Originally Posted by jadedeath

I can take that a step further:

Torture porn is the next logical step.

I mean really, I have no problem with video games, I play a ton of them myself, but being trained by the military, I'd much rather play a Halo or a Star Wars shooter rather than a military realistic simulation, or a GTA or anything of the sort. It's the same for movies.

Torture porn is just the next logical step from the 'guy with a mask that kills people and can't be stopped' it's just too realistic for my liking, and you know that there are some sick twisted f**ks that are out there beatin' it to this crap.

There's always going to be someone who's wanting to try and take it to the 'next level' for that extra gross-out factor.

Logan

I've never been able to get into FPS games that try to imitate real life. I'd rather be fighting some alien war (Halo, Gears of War) than World War whatever.

When I think of torture porn I mostly think of Saw. To me Saw is much more than torture porn even the overall quality of the series isn't that consistent. Other torture porn movies aren't as smart and rely on the gore aspect more heavily so I can see why the "genre" gets a bad name.

[jadedeath]

Originally Posted by assydingo

I've never been able to get into FPS games that try to imitate real life. I'd rather be fighting some alien war (Halo, Gears of War) than World War whatever.

I'm the same way, with the Star Wars games it's like 'hey... I died... but now I'm another clone! yippie!'

The imitating real life stuff is strange to me, like GTA4, I don't hang in the ghetto's with the gangbangers in real life... why would I want to play that on TV?

When I think of torture porn I mostly think of Saw. To me Saw is much more than torture porn even the overall quality of the series isn't that consistent. Other torture porn movies aren't as smart and rely on the gore aspect more heavily so I can see why the "genre" gets a bad name.

Personally I think that Saw should have stopped dead in it's tracks {pun intended} after the first one... maybe a follow up to see what Jigsaw was up to in his summer home, but nothing beyond that... we're at what... Saw 17.5 the smell of a crappy sequel?

Torture porn IMO gets it's bad name from Eli Roth and the Hostel movies, the guy makes an 'ok' movie in Cabin Fever and befriends Tarrantino and now we can't get rid of him... the worst part of Inglorious was Roth as a director wanting to be an actor...

Logan

[Grand Bob]

Originally Posted by EricJ

Don't think it's that they're "sick" enough to see it, just that they don't apply much thought to the reasons they think the momentary rush of seeing something "extreme" is so Cool.

Those aren't the people we are worried about. It's the ones who watch torture flicks that don't even use the lame excuse of wanting to see it for the thinly disguised "thriller" plot. Or even worse, the director and production team who would make such garbage knowing that people will pay to see it. The really sad thing about all of this is that there are kids dying of terminal diseases who can't buy a day, but would love nothing better than to survive long enough to drive a car. At the same time, there are healthy kids (and adults) who have nothing better to do with their time than to watch a woman's eye get melted by a blowtorch.

[jhiggy23]

Originally Posted by Grand Bob

Those aren't the people we are worried about. It's the ones who watch torture flicks that don't even use the lame excuse of wanting to see it for the thinly disguised "thriller" plot. Or even worse, the director and production team who would make such garbage knowing that people will pay to see it. The really sad thing about all of this is that there are kids dying of terminal diseases who can't buy a day, but would love nothing better than to survive long enough to drive a car. At the same time, there are healthy kids (and adults) who have nothing better to do with their time than to watch a woman's eye get melted by a blowtorch.

Agreed.

[EricJ]

7. Pixar Takes Over As THE Animation Studio
It used to be that whenever the words “animated movie” were uttered, people would think of Disney. Specifically the 2D cartoons like The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and The Jungle Book. And generally speaking, these were looked at as movies for the kids. Even if adults could still watch them without complaints (and don’t get me wrong, they’re great movies, aimed at kids or not), they weren’t really looked at as legitimate movies for every age.
Then in 2001, things started to really get going for Pixar, starting in 2001 with Monster’s Inc. Then we had Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E and finally their latest, Up, was released earlier this year.

If you have to pin a date on a timeline, June 2003:
"Finding Nemo" scared the living CRAP out of every studio in Hollywood....Every live-action studio. They just couldn't explain it.
Producers of Terminator 3, Tomb Raider 2, and the Ang Lee "Hulk" thought it was the End of Days, that adult audiences were going to see a Pixar movie, repeatedly, while their own pyrotechnics were dying sad deaths at the box office.
(And if you were in the audience back then, you knew why you were going back to see Nemo instead of Hulk. )

Up to that point, animation was seen as a commodity, and Dreamworks was still trying to make the melodramatic Disney-knockoffs, until they had their hit with Shrek--
John Lasseter once said "CGI is a tool, not a genre"...Because back in '01-'03, studios and columnists did think it was a genre, and that one studio was making money off of all of it: "From the hit studio that brought you Toy Story and Shrek!"
As a result, every studio thought a traditionally animated movie, and later a CGI, would make millions just for showing up--Which over the course of two summers turned out to be a rude awakening for Nickelodeon, "Spirit", "Sinbad", "Powerpuff Girls Movie" and even Disney's own "Treasure Planet".
One of the reasons we're celebrating the "return" of Princess & the Frog was that even Michael Eisner shut down his own traditional studios personally, rather than compete with a force of nature no one could explain and no one even dared try to.

(As for when studios learned that we stopped caring about other people's CGI, and that we actually knew how to tell Pixar's from everyone else's, you could pin July 2006:
The year studios were equally shocked to see audiences not go to see "The Ant Bully", and slowly realize, "...Okay, maybe they got a point there. ")