Pazuzu rose to the position of chief post-editing demon around 2015 when Takihi, “the demon who eats beautiful actresses’ clothing” retired/was cancelled under mysterious circumstances. His most ardent worshippers refer to this event as “Gamergate”
it’s often crazy to put on a foreign film and see vibrant colors. it’s almost like a religious experience. who knew green looked like green? american color graders are just like ‘lets turn the brightness down to barely being able to see anything on the screen.’
I think they do that to cover for shitty CGI. Can’t tell its shit if you can’t see it.
I don’t think it’s just that. I’ve noticed this in a lot of the dramedies as well, and I’m reasonably sure they’re not using CGI for scenes of characters chatting in a room.
Yet the director most famous for his muted colors, Christopher Nolan (who is red green colorblind and intentionally avoids color), is also famous for refusing to use CGI when practical effects are available.
I don’t think one dude is a good example when talking about trends. Nolan is an outlier in more ways than one.
If anything other directors are copying him without understanding why it works in his films and not in every film.
Does it work though? For being the first film shot totally in Imax, The Odyssey was kind of dull to look at.
The Odyssey was kind of dull to look at.
It’s a movie where the stills/screenshots aren’t that visually interesting but that the actual video (accompanied by a killer score/soundtrack) is somehow visually stunning. Agamemnon’s armor draws the eye in every scene it’s in (especially the opening of Troy’s gates), the giant Laestrygonians seemed terrifyingly strong and powerful, the visuals of Odysseus’s men slurping down Circe’s soup, all had visual qualities that make an indelible impression.
And obviously the dull, darkly lit, grayed out scene of the dead characters talking to Odysseus from beyond the grave really sells that scene, too.
Maybe I don’t have a subtle enough eye.
But still, there could have been some spectacle.
Like the scene where Zeus is destroying the ship, and for some reason he does it with rain and wind? And this was changed from the original story, where Zeus strikes with with, obviously, a gigantic fucking lightning bolt. Is there some artistic reason for this that I missed? I know Nolan hates CGI, but come on.
I enjoyed the movie well enough, but it never wowed me.
At the same time, I’m wondering how prominent of a trend it is. There have been a few recent examples of big budget movies that have made use of high saturation bright colors: the 2 Wicked movies, Project Hail Mary’s key scenes, the Avatar movies, Barbie, the Spider Man movies, etc.
Obviously kids movies and animated movies have always been colorful, but we’re also in an era where many studios are competing for kid eyeballs: Disney/Pixar of course, but also Sony (Kpop Demon Hunters, Hotel Transylvania, Spiderverse), Dreamworks (the Shrek universe, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Wild Robot), Illumination (Minions/Despicable Me Franchise, Mario, Sing), Paramount (Sonic, Paw Patrol, Spongebob), and the occasional independent (like Flow coming out of Latvia and winning an Oscar for best animated film). So it seems also that there’s plenty of work being done in bright colorful spaces.
Yeah I watched supergirl at home and it really showed off my tv’s ability to pair vibrant colors with deep blacks
“Hero” was so mindblowing when it came out!
Ironically, that movie purposefully used color themes to convey the mood of each scene.
It’s even more stupid when you consider the availability of HDR and Dolby Vision.
Suddenly you have access to high quality color mapping features thst formerly relied on you using expensive film to ensure you get all the colors you want, both pre and post processing.
But then you just take a dump all over it with an awful color grade that makes using HDR almost pointless.
I went with TCL MiniLED which has awesome contrast and deep blacks due to their newer backlight tech so it’s essentially a poor man’s OLED, and the films that actually used HDR/DV to their advantage look absolutely stunning. MI7’s opening with the submarine looks awesome with the contrast of the characters and their deep red and green displays illuminating the scene.
I haven’t heard the TCL miniLED. I’ll look into it. I saved up for OLED and then Best Buy had an awesome sale that they didn’t want to honor when I came to pick it up. I see now that Costco has the same price for bigger tvs. I’m guessing it’s because they have competition now? This was 4 years ago or something too that best buy tried to screw me. They honored it in the end, but there was a lot of hulabaloo going on with management.
I forgot exactly how it works but they essentially set the same price at every retailer, so a price drop is either a one off sale or everyone else also price dropped, hence why Best Buy is supposed to offer a price match.
For TCL, it was the QM8k, which has the new WHVA panel and a higher LED backlight density which makes it look like an OLED.
Only worth it if you can get it at a good price though (1-1.5k), otherwise you might find something better in the same price range at 2k and higher.
I got a TCL QM7 55" 2 years ago and love it. TCL was very reasonably priced and it had good reviews. The HDR is great.
Mine was $800 and a 48". Costco has a 55" at $899 for OLED.
I’d settle for muted colors if things were lit at all at this point. So many movies feel like they filmed in an abandoned warehouse at midnight with all the lights turned off.
A movie video essayist I watch did a good video I share with non cinema folks about the lack of colors in marvel movies.
You might enjoy it: Why do Marvel movies look kind of ugly?
I wish Wes Anderson would make movies with real plots because his use of colors is incredible every time.
Every time Wes Anderson comes up I feel like a fake movie buff. I’ve never seen one of his films. I hear about them. Watch a movie video essayist talk about them. See the trailers and things for them. But never seen one.
Maybe I should just take a day and marathon his stuff
Watch The Royal Tenenbaumbs and Bottle Rocket. Wes Anderson can be a little overrated and honestly a little one note stylistically, but those are my favorites
Edit: oh and Life Aquatic is kinda iconic
Grand Budapest Hotel is my favorite use of the tropes/style that he is known for. Royal Tenenbaums is the movie that really put him on the map, in my opinion (although I might be biased because that came out right when I was looking to expand my understand of what film could be).
And Moonrise Kingdom is personally my favorite of his films. I think it could be worth watching those 3, and then deciding if you want to go further.
New Star Trek manages to look dark even with tons of lights for the lensflares. Because nothing says „space“ and „modern“ like working in a dim, depressing space while simultaneously getting blinded by half a dozen lights strategically placed at eye height.
Oh don’t get me started on lensflares or motion blur. So many people think we need to keep them in order to know we’re watching a movie because “that’s how it’s always been”. I don’t get why limited technology of the past should be the standard. Should we go back to black and white only again? Why do we have sound? Never used to. You had an organist to tell you you’re in a movie.
I always think about old school star wars for space. There is not a single doubt in my mind they’re in space during those fighter battles, but I can see everything without getting blinded or having to strain.
Motion blur is necessary for movies. They don’t run at 60fps, they run at 24fps. They would feel stuttery if they didn’t have motion blur. That’s why even computer animated movies have fake motion blur added to them.
Except they could run at 60+ fps. I watched The Hobbit in High Frame Rate and it was glorious. It didn’t take off because too many people complained of it not looking like a movie. The exact same complaints they had when movies switched to HD. Only this time the complaints sunk it for the most part instead of studios taking the time to adjust to new production methods. We get like one HFR movie a year now.
Wasn’t the problem that you got more information in the same time so that the footage had to be sped up and that looked silly ?
It’s more because there was no blur covering everything so you definitely saw some of the tricks they used. Saw it was just costumes and stuff.
It wasn’t major or like in your face in my opinion but it was there, and people couldn’t accept a transition time as studios figured out how to make stuff look good at the higher frame rate. Better or different makeup or add more oomph to costumes or whatever.
If you go and look at old forum comments about movies like, I want to say The Prestige (2006), some of the first ones to hit Blu-ray, they said similar stuff. The higher pixel counts revealed when rocks were fake and sets and stuff.
The issue is the fake CGI motion blur. It’s overdone. It’s not at all natural the way real motion blur on a film camera is.
I blame the digital workflows where everything is shot in RAW at high shutter speed and then digitally motion blurred and colour graded all to crap. Watch old movies that were shot on film and they look a million times better than the brown haze we got with Dune.
I think they’re talking about overdone motion blur. You wouldn’t notice it if it wasn’t overdone.
No, I’m taking about higher frame rate which makes motion blur completely outdated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_frame_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_with_high_frame_rates
But then what happens to movies not done at the higher fps? You have to compensate somehow for the older films or the hardware that doesn’t accept it. I know AI does a really shitty job about compensating for higher fps movies brought down and lower brought up.
You don’t have to do anything. Those movies can still be played by high frame rate equipment but at their original frame rate and nothing stops those processes from working to make lower fps movies.
Avatar: Fire and Ash was actually a mixed frame rate movie, shot in 48fps but some scenes done in 24 fps. You can just hold frames for twice as long or half as long as needed.
Oh don’t get me started on lensflares or motion blur. So many people think we need to keep them in order to know we’re watching a movie because “that’s how it’s always been”.
Motion blur only started cropping up in action movies in the 90s to hide bad choreography and lens flare is just something a few directors started doing in the 2000s. Tons of well lit and colorful movies have existed since movies started to be filmed in color and there are plenty without either of those two things.
Anyone who thinks that is ‘how it has always been’ is extrapolating it from a few directors and their blockbuster movies.
confidently incorrect there, buddy
The new Spider-Man was mostly CG-ed Glasgow but they actually went to some lengths to light it properly. It’s literally night and day compared to the last 10 years.
Oh yeah, the new Spider-Man was beautiful. That’s definitely a good modern example showing you can be moody and depressed without just being black darkness
Watch Gone With the Wind and suffer the consequences of being disappointed by the lighting in almost every modern movie.
Or a lot of the Hitchcock movies. They portray so much with how they play with light.
Cool. Patrick is the reason I finally subscribed to Nebula for his Star Wars Christmas Special, and I’ve stuck around ever since.
So you’d say you drank the Christmas milk? One of us, one of us!
Thanks for the video link, that was great and explained it well. The part at the end showing the ones done well makes me crave that.
This is just a beginning theory, but I wonder if it has something to do with color blindness or something? They may be getting test audiences that are accidentally more skewed towards it, since men are more likely to have it for some reason.
Colorblindness is part of the reason for Christopher Nolan’s visual style avoiding red and green. He’s colorblind so he chooses to avoid colors he’d need outside help with, and likes making visuals that look good even with red/green colorblindness.
And of course, he’s basically up there as one of the most bankable big budget directors there is, so he probably has an outsize influence even on other directors who aren’t colorblind.
That’s interesting, I bet that’s part of it. He must treat it like black and white. I read an interview that he stays under-budget and before the deadline so he doesn’t have to have executives telling him what to do. Maybe these directors have to listen to the producers, who from what I’ve seen, really only care about the bean counting. His movies are still beautiful because he has the authority and he cares.
I doubt it’s color blindness. As others have mentioned this lack of color seems to be a more US based phenomenon. I think it’s the logical result of the obsession with “gritty and real” that took off with things like “Bourne Identity” in 2002. The laziest and cheapest way to convey that “dark and drab” vibe is by just sucking all the colours out. Movies started getting to mimic Bourne and others like it because they were popular (and yes, like always Hollywood did zero actual investigation into why they’re popular and just tried to copy surface level). That just kept spreading and now we’re stuck with it
The dark muted limited-colors thing started way before 2002
Here’s a random example, the matrix from 1999
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/r_aina/43070750/172261/172261_original.png
I dunno if 1999 is “way before”. That’s only three years. I wasn’t trying to nail the very first movie that started the trend, just an early example. Bourne specifically I know influenced the next few James Bond movies and they toned down the saturation directly because of Bourne, and it kept spreading.
Yeah, it’s a discussion for real. It’s okay to stand out now and then and do the less color if there’s a reason. It seems like they lost the plot on the color portion.
I thought the main point of OLED was blacker blacks. But, I don’t have one.
And, yes, the trend of applying an overall color and contrast wash to different scenes in a movie, and entire movies, has gone too far.
Yes, the blacks are blacker, but the colors are more vibrant in contrast. I love it for video games. Animations in general are better and so are sports. They hide the good settings when you get the tv though. *The reds have more variety, they’re not only purple based.
Red and Green is danger
Lol Christmas is dangerous
Put them all together and you get the Green Lantern franchise. (The comics more than any on-screen media.)
There’s a whole separate subcategory of this complaint titled, “Color Grading Fucking Up Re-Releases.”
I think one of the LoTR editions is grossly color-graded, and streaming Buffy The Vampire Slayer will give you color grading in conflict with the narrative, but you’ll likely be too distracted by the bizarre framing to notice.
Ah, I love how incredibly stupid and careless the Buffy “remaster” was made. Let me talk about that in two pictures:
Hell, why not show parts of the set, including the crew. Color grading was completely skipped for some scenes, which derails the whole narrative, as they’re now seemingly taking place during day, for example. It’s amazing.
Why would anyone do this‽ The show was so good about visual tone even while being extremely campy. What next, fixing “The Body” by adding in the background music that it’s missing‽
Tom Servo: “Folks, they just didn’t care.”
It is something to behold… briefly, before popping in the DVD.
Oh nooooooo
Slight digression: “The demon that eats colors” would be an interesting addition to Magic: The Gathering, if it doesn’t exist already in some form
Chromatog!
Which would get confused with Chronatog.
I saw Rebel One in theaters. The inky blacks of space were turned into a staticky grey, which I didn’t notice until the end of the movie when they got back to the beautiful anthracite that is the entire reason I want to see things happen in outer space.
Got any screenshots for examples?
Denis Villenueve’s movies are good examples.
