They are the worst streaming service. They looked at cable TV and said “this is perfect” while being apparently oblivious that most people who pay for streaming services HATE cable TV.
The only thing that made Prime worth it was shipping, but then Amazon decided they wanted to own the whole shipping process and stopped using reliable shippers and brought it all in house and now its a dice roll if you are going to get your package or if its going to be lost, and half the time its damaged.
I have prime for 70% shipping, 25% automatic photo/video uploads, and 5% video streaming.
I think the only amazon things I’ve watched are The Boys and Swarm. Both good but not worth a subscription. I also have other ways to get these shows if needed.
Then they tried with groceries - fail, then they tried with healthcare - fail. The whole of the stock market is wondering what Amazon’s “next big thing” will be. Likely going down the toilet is my guess.
Too much chinese garbage most of America has realized they don’t really need.
It’s like watching the village bully try to harass the village bull. It’s not like you are friends with the bull but you’re definitely going to watch the aftermath.
Well when you basically have your ass saved in the 80’s by the Lavenderest of musical writers who make the new foundation of your brand narratives of acceptance and love for the outsider with your flagship renaissance peice being a retelling of a Gay man’s obvious pining for acceptance of a forbidden romance and then use that formula for practically every hit princess movie to follow… You are just a tad beholden?
I have zero problems with regulating corporations. I just want those regulations to be for the public good. Yes you will pay your workers properly, no you can’t dump toxic sludge in our water. What Meatball did was attempt to regulate them for his good, not the public. He wanted to enforce his vision. I would be just as upset if he had tried to force them to say include more diversity in their movies. Yes I personally would like Disney to do this, but my personal whims should not have the power of law.
You aren’t really siding with Disney, you are siding against agenda driven regulations. And if that doesn’t make you feel better just remember the ACLU defended Nazis right to freedom of speech.
He now realizes hes a stupid tool for his stupid party and his election campaign is not selling, once he losses that shit, he’ll end up alone eating shit fighting lawsuits from all directions.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just “Move on” and stop dealing with the problems from your past? Just like this guy Kyle who “Moved on” from owing me $2,000 and thinks that’s the end of it.
The pendulum is swinging back towards the monopoly model that destroyed cable. Time to dust off the old Jolly Roger and teach streaming an old lesson of what happens when you price gouge people.
People were obviously pissed off at cable’s fragmented model, but what killed it was the existence of video on demand services over the internet. The fact that at a certain point Netflix had everything certainly helped in adoption, but the biggest factor was not having to view at a specific time.
There is no such killer improvement on the horizon. All there is is the fragmented streaming market, or piracy.
A) Your average movie goer isn’t capable of telling from a trailer if a movie is going to be garbage or not. Heck, your average movie goer can’t tell from watching THE MOVIE if it’s garbage or not.
B) Levi’s last flick, while not exactly a hot mess, wasn’t exactly great either. The Skittles product placement was 110% un-necessary and backpedaling to go “no, no, it’s a family movie, see?” lowers the bar for family movies.
Just looking at this year, Cocaine Bear and The Machine probably didn’t need to happen.
I actually enjoyed cocaine bear. That one felt like a breath of fresh air to the usual garbo. Was genuinely a fun film to watch where it felt like you were also watching people have fun making it.
Self awareness can be fun, that doesn’t make it a good movie.
I laughed so hard at Betty White, swearing like a sailor, feeding people to a giant New England crocodile in Lake Placid, but I’d never dream of calling it a good movie.
Wanted has Morgan Freeman delivering the classic line “Will somebody, please, shoot this motherfucker?” Again, does not make it a good movie.
I would argue your second statement in A) assumes that a movie can objectively be rated good or bad. Plus it also seems to claim to know exactly what people want to see from a movie. Never s fan when someone seems to say, "I know better than you do what you like."
I'll agree a trailer doesn't always do a good job. But to claim a person can't tell if what they watched is good is hardly a statement a same person would make. Possibly a narcissist would say it. Or someone else full of themselves.
There is obviously technique that can be graded, but that doesn't make a movie.
Movies can absolutely be objectively rated good or bad, all the component pieces can be good or bad, writing, acting, directing, pacing, hell, even lighting, editing and special effects.
The problem is your average movie goer can’t tell the difference. Sure, if something is ESPECIALLY bad like the visual effects in the Flash, they’ll pick up on that.
Quite more often something can be entirely awful and the reaction is “Well, I had fun…” That doesn’t make it “good”.
You can have a good movie with poor elements and a poor movie with great elements. I'd even argue you can have a good movie with bad acting. Plus, it's all about the intent of the movie, as with any piece of art. Cocaine Bear had an intent. It fulfilled that intent. Claiming that art can objectively be rated is naive.
I don't know what you expect to accomplish with this. If you want to make an argument by example, be prepared to make it exhaustive, otherwise it's simply anecdotal. Anecdotes does not an argument make.
My point is that this is a very subjective realm. You can know all you want about technique and still make a bad movie. And someone who knows nothing can still make a good movie. The odds don't work in their favor, sure, but it's possible. Technique just helps, but it's neither a requirement nor a guarantee. And part of determining whether a film is done well is knowing the film's purpose and theme. Cult classics exist for a reason. They aren't "bad." They're just not popular with folks who didn't get it. You will always be colored by your biases. You can not like a film but that doesn't mean it was unnecessary. You aren't an authority as much as you want to pretend to the throne.
I feel like you just like hearing yourself talk because you clearly ignored almost everything I said. If you're going to act like a brick wall, there's no point in discussion until you even come close to remotely acknowledging any of my points let alone refuting them. I get you took a film class. It doesn't make you an auteur.
I agree, movies are art and art is (mostly) subjective. Not everyone likes going to the Fast and Furious movies for example but the audience that's there for it tends to love it. Same with things like Star Wars or Top Gun. All you can objectively say is whether the movie was technically shot well and for that you need knowledge of making movies.
Movies are made for different reasons. Some are made for the 'art', but some are made simply for entertainment. Shitty B-movies are a whole genere about being so 'bad' they're fun, and that's they're purpose. Fast and Furious movies aren't being made for the art.
I feel like you can't really watch trailers anymore nowadays, they tend to give away a lot of the story already. For example, I watched the trailer for the Meg 2 and it already gave away most of the twists and who would die. I know that they have to try and hype you up but it sucks when they basically spoil the movie.
Your opinion on trailers is nothing new and you’re not wrong. But then you went and chose MEG 2 as your example??? 🤔 Like that movie was an Agatha Christie mystery or something?! 🤣
It was just an example, I could've used most other modern movies as an example as well. It's just the most recent movie I saw and it happens to be a guilty pleasure of my GF to watch shark movies (besides sharknado, that's just way too bad), before that I saw Oppenheimer and MI 7 so I'd like to think that my taste in movies is pretty varied.
This comment reminds me of right as I was about to watch The Meg, someone told me they were blown away by the twist. “Bro, wait for it, holy shit” and “the twist” was the most predictable thing that could have happened. The fucking shark died with most of the movie left to go, how is ANOTHER SHARK a fucking crazy twist??
Just to note, this is so not new that the original trailers for the original release of Planet of the Apes spoiled the ending way back in 1968. And here we are today…
On the opposite end, from watching the trailer I could not understand how Barbie was going to be as good as people said, it seemed so one note! I’m so glad it wasn’t all shown to me ahead of time
I haven't seen the Barbie movie but I've heard more people say that the trailer is nothing like the movie. Interesting, maybe this will make film companies reconsider their trailer strategies.
Your average movie goer isn’t capable of telling from a trailer if a movie is going to be garbage or not.
Of course not. A trailer is just an ad. That’s like expecting to be able to tell if a smartwatch is good after watching an ad.
So a possible solution could be professional/expert reviews. We need to be able to trust them though (no bought reviews etc.) and they shouldn’t be snobbish against pure entertainment movies. Unfortunately this will only work if people actively seek out those reviews (at least I can’t think of a way to actively push the reviews to the consumers), which does not work as long as movies are consumed in order to not think. Which they will be as long as they are as shitty and brainless as many are right now.
We used to have that back in the day with Siskel and Ebert. Two, classically trained film reviewers, who had a show that aired the week before the films they were reviewing were due to come out.
Of the two, Ebert would go easier on pure entertainment movies than Siskel would. They didn’t always agree, but when they did, you could be assured it was either really good or really bad.
We don’t really have an equivalent in this day and age with review embargoes and such.
Not sure that’s even a thing. Sure, they were educated and well informed, still…
If you are after a popular film critic that really engages with the material, we have Mark Kermode in the UK. I might not agree with everything he thinks, but he’s consistent enough that you can use his opinion as a yardstick. I strongly recommend you check him out.
While S & E were great for explaining why they liked or did not like movies, their opinions were still opinions and at best they gave middling reviews to the types of movies they did not like even when those movies were the best of their type.
Plus Ebert gave Anaconda a high rating and praise. Fucking Anaconda.
He liked Spawn as well which I still have not entirely forgiven him for! But like I say, of the two, he was the one who went easier on populist media than Siskel did. That’s probably why putting the two of them together worked better than anyone else who inherited the shows they left as they bounced around from one to the next to the next.
Who else had their platform before Siskel died? Rex Reed + somebody else was one, and I think there was one more pair as well.
Rex Reed sticks out because he turned into a giant bitchy queen when he really hated a movie and it was hilarious.
I didn't always agree with Gene & Roger, but I did watch them every Saturday. What made it a little weird for me was watching Roger's magnum opus Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a young adult, and trying - never succeeding - to reconcile that movie with this man I grew up listening to.
I give props to Ebert for putting his money where his mouth is and actually writing a movie. While not a great movie, he was still willing to go through the process of writing a screenplay and getting the movie made.
Cocaine Bear was freaking awesome! Sometimes people don’t need an amazingly deep experience and just want to relax and enjoy themselves and have a good time.
I quit prime after the last prime day and have saved so much money. It’s really something how much influence that subscription had on me, and how cancelling it changed my buying habits.
It’s crazy isn’t it? I canceled mine probably around the same time. Now I actually shop around online and either find a better deal or buy straight from the manufacturer for the same price (meaning they end up with more money since Amazon doesn’t get a cut). Amazon is now my LAST resort instead of the first place I land.
The unlimited full resolution photo storage is what keeps me subscribed. Everything else is just extra.
The Prime shipping I don’t really care about; it’s easy enough to just wait until the cart hits the free shipping spend. Prime streaming was fine, previously. We like a few of their shows, but it’s just as convenient to pirate then now that they’re adding ads.
Is there a better option for cheap off-site unlimited photo storage?
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