And here we are back in philosophy 101, Scott subscribes to Purism whereas, at least with movies, I think you can judge them as whatever you like.
For example, as a comedy, Ironman 2 is light on jokes, meaning I wasn't in a humerus state of mind as often as I could have been had it's creator focused more on making me laugh. So as a comedy it gets maybe a C or a D but as an action movie it is much higher. All of those ratings in aggregate form its rating as a movie et al.
You're comparing it to a basketball leaves no room for movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith which kinda blur the lines between action and comedy. Or anything along those lines as they must be judged strictly as what they are, genre-wise, as determined by you.
They aren't on my radar, and I've never seen them, but let's not forget that Tyler Perry has made a god damn goldmine making pure comedy movies for past decade+.
Also, for an example of a top stand-up making movies, check out Mike Burbiglia. He's done multiple comedies now, although they're smaller indie releases, not major studio pushes.
Rym's TOTD is better cause I already follow Jacques Pepin and chop garlic correct. But he's right, What We Do In The Shadows? Great comedy. Way more about the jokes than vampire-nature of it.
Pulling these from an older thread about a list of modern comedies: 21 & 22 Jump Street, Spy, Trainwreck, Funny People, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, This is the End, Wolfe of Wall Street (Surprisingly comedic), Kick Ass, Midnight in Paris, Deadpool, Sleepwalk with Me, Horrible Bosses, 50/50, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, The Nice Guys, Neighbors, War Dogs...
Louis CK isn't making or starring in any movies, but he collaborates with Woody Allen. People love to use him as a character actor in little bits. Right now, the biggest comedian is Kevin Hart who is the only person still releasing stand-up concert movies. Anything plot movie he stars in however is pretty bad.
They aren't on my radar, and I've never seen them, but let's not forget that Tyler Perry has made a god damn goldmine making pure comedy movies for past decade+
Having watched a fair amount of Tyler Perry, you have to know what to choose. Films like Madea's Witness Protection or Tyler Perry's Good Deeds are terribly boring and just awful. But when you get to Temptation or Tyler Perry Goes to Jail? Man, those get so over the top and maudlin you have to laugh.
Your knowledge of modern comedy movies is insufficient to talk about this topic with any authority at all. It would be painful to listen to, except you guys can come off as entertaining even when speaking from a position of extreme ignorance.
Your knowledge of modern comedy movies is insufficient to talk about this topic with any authority at all. It would be painful to listen to, except you guys can come off as entertaining even when speaking from a position of extreme ignorance.
The only Star Wars extended universe novels I've read are Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. They were widely hailed as the best of the best, and turned out to be extremely overrated. I can safely assume all other Star Wars novels are worse, and therefore crap, without reading them. And wouldn't you know it? This assumption is true! All those novels are trash! I don't need to read them to know it. I can talk about this topic with authority despite an extremely low level of knowledge.
Every year at Anime Boston we judge anime based entirely on a jpg and a short description. Our prejudice is over 90% accurate. I have the power to judge something by its cover and be right almost all the time.
The same goes for comedy movies. I've seen the recent ones that are heralded as the best of the best, and they are all worse than anyone claims them to be. I can safely assume that the rest are garbage, and I'm better off not wasting my short life by watching them. I can also judge by the poster with over 90% accuracy.
I can also figure things out based on the people giving the reviews. For example, up above in this thread someone said Austin Powers was good. Yeah, it was good if you asked 15 year old Scott watching it in the theater. Watching it now is a cringefest. People praise Shaun of the Dead. It's OK at best. Not even close to the 10/10 so many nerds give it. Don't even get me started on the Superbad fans. That shit is unwatchable.
All those people who think that those movies are good, their opinions are actually quite valuable to me. I know that their taste is trash. I know that they have the sense of humor of a 15 year old Scott. And I know that anything they like I can avoid like the plague unless I receive a great deal of evidence to the contrary. I mean, 15 year old Scott also liked Monty Python. He wasn't completely stupid, but I still wouldn't trust his reviews for shit.
If you want to see someone with a worthless opinion, I have a co-worker who fucking loves Avatar. The one with the blue people. Even worse, I have a co-worker who hates Groundhog Day and thinks the best movie is the new Karate Kid starring Will Smith's son. Everyone here is at least better than that, so give yourself a little round of applause.
I wonder how Scott manages to try anything new with those perimeters. The purity watching something blind by judging it and hoping for the best? That still can end up in trash. If wonder what he would do Yowa Pedal suddenly turned into trash.
Saying that, Shaun the Sheep is probably closest to something you'd like. It's almost completely silent using old Marx Bros/Looney Tunes slapstick and sight gags. Not sure if you'd call that a comedy since it's still animated, but who knows. But for the love of god, you should not watch Sausage Party (the epitome of offensive, low-brow humor) or Bojack Horseman (the epitome of cringe, Superbad humor) for the case you might explode.
I wonder how Scott manages to try anything new with those perimeters. The purity watching something blind by judging it and hoping for the best? That still can end up in trash. If wonder what he would do Yowa Pedal suddenly turned into trash.
Saying that, Shaun the Sheep is probably closest to something you'd like. It's almost completely silent using old Marx Bros/Looney Tunes slapstick and sight gags. Not sure if you'd call that a comedy since it's still animated, but who knows. But for the love of god, you should not watch Sausage Party (the epitome of offensive, low-brow humor) or Bojack Horseman (the epitome of cringe, Superbad humor) for the case you might explode.
Yowapedal is trash. I just happen to like it, even though I recognize that it is garbage. I like Initial D also, but that's even worse than Yowapedal.
How do I try anything new? There are new things I can tell are good. They go in the queue. But things enter the queue at a faster rate than I process the queue. It's a line that just gets longer and longer as the time I spend consuming media continues to shrink.
For example, I know that Steven Universe is good. I've seen a few episodes. I want to watch it. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Absolutely anything that's new doesn't even have a chance of getting my attention before I finish that. They are in the back of the queue. Of course, I can't even watch Steven until I catch back up on Adventure Time. And I can't even watch that because I don't spend as much time watching TV as all you nerds seem to. Almost all of my passive screen time is YouTube while at work.
Let's do this. I'm gonna make a thread, and we will all log how much TV we watch, and what we watched, each day for an entire week.
Your post just clarifies all the reasons why your opinion holds less than no weight at all. I'll make four points, which you will, of course, dismiss entirely.
1. Think of genre as a tag that can be attached to a movie, not a category that a movie is attached to or filed in. We're talking emails in Gmail having multiple possible labels, instead of folders and subfolders where each email can only have one unique location.
This means that if you want to talk about and compare "funny movies", there's no reason to exclude any that have a hyphen in the genre, like action-comedy, romantic-comedy, scifi-comedy, rom-zom-com, teen-comedy, etc.
2. Comedy is subjective. There is only one requirement: does it make people laugh? That's it! You can say "I don't find this funny" but you can't say "That movie isn't funny" when its intended audience is laughing all the way through. Your opinion on the matter is literally worthless in this regard.
You watched Young Frankenstein recently and thought it held up. I watched it recently and thought it was painful! Is it still funny? Yes! To you!
3. Comedy is disposable. What is funny for one generation is never intended to be funny for the next. Tastes change all the time.
If a comedy movie survives to the next generation and remains funny, that is an amazing accomplishment, but it doesn't mean all the movies that don't survive aren't comedies, or aren't even good comedies. They could be amazing, hilarious, genre-defining, massive impact on popular culture, critically acclaimed, box office smashes ... successful in every regard... and still be considered painfully unfunny just 15 years later.
Comedy is about riding a wave. It's about landing with the zeitgeist.
If you pick a random comedy movie from 2004 and watch it now, the chances are it wouldn't be funny to you. This is not a failing of the movie. This is a failing of you.
4. Lastly, it's grossly unfair to compare the greatest comedies of the entire 20th century to a single list of movies from 2004, most of which you haven't seen, and pass judgement that comedies aren't funny any more. You know how many shit comedy movies came out the same year as Life of Brian? ALL OF THEM. That is, if the standard is Life of Brian.
Conclusion: comedy movies exist for the now. If you don't watch comedies when they come out or soon after, you are not able to judge their worth or their level of humor. Some movie remain funny in the long term, but they are rare gems, and the writers and directors weren't even aiming for that to happen.
Personally, while Life of Brian, This is Spinal Tap and Groundhog Day are my three top comedy movies of all time, I laughed more in the closing credits of 22 Jump Street than I did when I last watched all three combined.
I know that Steven Universe is good. I've seen a few episodes. I want to watch it. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Absolutely anything that's new doesn't even have a chance of getting my attention before I finish that. They are in the back of the queue. Of course, I can't even watch Steven until I catch back up on Adventure Time. And I can't even watch that because I don't spend as much time watching TV as all you nerds seem to. Almost all of my passive screen time is YouTube while at work.
Let's do this. I'm gonna make a thread, and we will all log how much TV we watch, and what we watched, each day for an entire week.
That seems like way more work than just watching the shows.
1) Sure, you are correct. You can categorize and label movies however. But my original thesis is that there are no good recent comedy movies. I'm only talking about the kinds of movies that are 100% comedy. That kind of movie is the kind that I am saying is severely lacking. There are quite a few good recent movies that aren't purely 100% comedy.
2) I'm sure there is someone out there who thinks Schindler's List is funny, though it is objectively NOT a comedy. I can recognize something's greatness without personally enjoying it. I can recognize a comedy's greatness, even if I don't personally find it funny.
3) Comedy is typically disposable, but not always. As with all art, longevity is a requirement for true greatness. You might have the comedy hit of the year, but if it is forgotten a year later, there isn't even an argument if you try to compare it to the likes of say, Airplane! which will still be funny long after we're all dead.
But I knew you would think like this, as you also have the same opinion about sports. For me, 99.9999% of all sports are disposable. I think there are only a few sporting events I've watched in their entirety more than once, but watched many sporting events that are great moments in sport. There are many records that are broken but are surpassed later, but at the time were great records.
Standup comedy is live and disposable, as is sketch comedy and improv comedy. My life has literally been changed by watching comedy material that my current self would probably sneer at.
Movies are the same. Let them be disposable, watch them as they come out, don't hold them to standards the creators never intended for them. For every Life of Brian I can appreciate decades after I first saw it there are dozens of Dumb and Dumbers that I get maximum enjoyment out of for the time they were intended to be funny.
The problem with the disposable comedies like Dumb & Dumber is that I am no longer dumb or dumber. When I was 15 I loved that shit, and I had plenty of free time to kill. If I was 15 now, I would probably love the shit out of Sausage Party. But being thirty fucking four, low brow trash is not funny anymore, and I don't have time for it. Let the 15 year olds of today enjoy it. Just don't try to sell it as actually good.
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For example, as a comedy, Ironman 2 is light on jokes, meaning I wasn't in a humerus state of mind as often as I could have been had it's creator focused more on making me laugh. So as a comedy it gets maybe a C or a D but as an action movie it is much higher. All of those ratings in aggregate form its rating as a movie et al.
You're comparing it to a basketball leaves no room for movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith which kinda blur the lines between action and comedy. Or anything along those lines as they must be judged strictly as what they are, genre-wise, as determined by you.
I'm lazy when it comes to garlic and either buy it pre-peeled or chopped/cubed in jars. Lazy. So lazy.
ANGRY GRANDPAS!
Also, for an example of a top stand-up making movies, check out Mike Burbiglia. He's done multiple comedies now, although they're smaller indie releases, not major studio pushes.
Pulling these from an older thread about a list of modern comedies: 21 & 22 Jump Street, Spy, Trainwreck, Funny People, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, This is the End, Wolfe of Wall Street (Surprisingly comedic), Kick Ass, Midnight in Paris, Deadpool, Sleepwalk with Me, Horrible Bosses, 50/50, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, The Nice Guys, Neighbors, War Dogs...
Louis CK isn't making or starring in any movies, but he collaborates with Woody Allen. People love to use him as a character actor in little bits. Right now, the biggest comedian is Kevin Hart who is the only person still releasing stand-up concert movies. Anything plot movie he stars in however is pretty bad. Having watched a fair amount of Tyler Perry, you have to know what to choose. Films like Madea's Witness Protection or Tyler Perry's Good Deeds are terribly boring and just awful. But when you get to Temptation or Tyler Perry Goes to Jail? Man, those get so over the top and maudlin you have to laugh.
I'm going to see Deadpool as soon as I have a convenient chance to.
Every year at Anime Boston we judge anime based entirely on a jpg and a short description. Our prejudice is over 90% accurate. I have the power to judge something by its cover and be right almost all the time.
The same goes for comedy movies. I've seen the recent ones that are heralded as the best of the best, and they are all worse than anyone claims them to be. I can safely assume that the rest are garbage, and I'm better off not wasting my short life by watching them. I can also judge by the poster with over 90% accuracy.
I can also figure things out based on the people giving the reviews. For example, up above in this thread someone said Austin Powers was good. Yeah, it was good if you asked 15 year old Scott watching it in the theater. Watching it now is a cringefest. People praise Shaun of the Dead. It's OK at best. Not even close to the 10/10 so many nerds give it. Don't even get me started on the Superbad fans. That shit is unwatchable.
All those people who think that those movies are good, their opinions are actually quite valuable to me. I know that their taste is trash. I know that they have the sense of humor of a 15 year old Scott. And I know that anything they like I can avoid like the plague unless I receive a great deal of evidence to the contrary. I mean, 15 year old Scott also liked Monty Python. He wasn't completely stupid, but I still wouldn't trust his reviews for shit.
If you want to see someone with a worthless opinion, I have a co-worker who fucking loves Avatar. The one with the blue people. Even worse, I have a co-worker who hates Groundhog Day and thinks the best movie is the new Karate Kid starring Will Smith's son. Everyone here is at least better than that, so give yourself a little round of applause.
Saying that, Shaun the Sheep is probably closest to something you'd like. It's almost completely silent using old Marx Bros/Looney Tunes slapstick and sight gags. Not sure if you'd call that a comedy since it's still animated, but who knows. But for the love of god, you should not watch Sausage Party (the epitome of offensive, low-brow humor) or Bojack Horseman (the epitome of cringe, Superbad humor) for the case you might explode.
How do I try anything new? There are new things I can tell are good. They go in the queue. But things enter the queue at a faster rate than I process the queue. It's a line that just gets longer and longer as the time I spend consuming media continues to shrink.
For example, I know that Steven Universe is good. I've seen a few episodes. I want to watch it. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Absolutely anything that's new doesn't even have a chance of getting my attention before I finish that. They are in the back of the queue. Of course, I can't even watch Steven until I catch back up on Adventure Time. And I can't even watch that because I don't spend as much time watching TV as all you nerds seem to. Almost all of my passive screen time is YouTube while at work.
Let's do this. I'm gonna make a thread, and we will all log how much TV we watch, and what we watched, each day for an entire week.
1. Think of genre as a tag that can be attached to a movie, not a category that a movie is attached to or filed in. We're talking emails in Gmail having multiple possible labels, instead of folders and subfolders where each email can only have one unique location.
This means that if you want to talk about and compare "funny movies", there's no reason to exclude any that have a hyphen in the genre, like action-comedy, romantic-comedy, scifi-comedy, rom-zom-com, teen-comedy, etc.
2. Comedy is subjective. There is only one requirement: does it make people laugh? That's it! You can say "I don't find this funny" but you can't say "That movie isn't funny" when its intended audience is laughing all the way through. Your opinion on the matter is literally worthless in this regard.
You watched Young Frankenstein recently and thought it held up. I watched it recently and thought it was painful! Is it still funny? Yes! To you!
3. Comedy is disposable. What is funny for one generation is never intended to be funny for the next. Tastes change all the time.
If a comedy movie survives to the next generation and remains funny, that is an amazing accomplishment, but it doesn't mean all the movies that don't survive aren't comedies, or aren't even good comedies. They could be amazing, hilarious, genre-defining, massive impact on popular culture, critically acclaimed, box office smashes ... successful in every regard... and still be considered painfully unfunny just 15 years later.
Comedy is about riding a wave. It's about landing with the zeitgeist.
If you pick a random comedy movie from 2004 and watch it now, the chances are it wouldn't be funny to you. This is not a failing of the movie. This is a failing of you.
4. Lastly, it's grossly unfair to compare the greatest comedies of the entire 20th century to a single list of movies from 2004, most of which you haven't seen, and pass judgement that comedies aren't funny any more. You know how many shit comedy movies came out the same year as Life of Brian? ALL OF THEM. That is, if the standard is Life of Brian.
Conclusion: comedy movies exist for the now. If you don't watch comedies when they come out or soon after, you are not able to judge their worth or their level of humor. Some movie remain funny in the long term, but they are rare gems, and the writers and directors weren't even aiming for that to happen.
Personally, while Life of Brian, This is Spinal Tap and Groundhog Day are my three top comedy movies of all time, I laughed more in the closing credits of 22 Jump Street than I did when I last watched all three combined.
2) I'm sure there is someone out there who thinks Schindler's List is funny, though it is objectively NOT a comedy. I can recognize something's greatness without personally enjoying it. I can recognize a comedy's greatness, even if I don't personally find it funny.
3) Comedy is typically disposable, but not always. As with all art, longevity is a requirement for true greatness. You might have the comedy hit of the year, but if it is forgotten a year later, there isn't even an argument if you try to compare it to the likes of say, Airplane! which will still be funny long after we're all dead.
But I knew you would think like this, as you also have the same opinion about sports. For me, 99.9999% of all sports are disposable. I think there are only a few sporting events I've watched in their entirety more than once, but watched many sporting events that are great moments in sport. There are many records that are broken but are surpassed later, but at the time were great records.
Standup comedy is live and disposable, as is sketch comedy and improv comedy. My life has literally been changed by watching comedy material that my current self would probably sneer at.
Movies are the same. Let them be disposable, watch them as they come out, don't hold them to standards the creators never intended for them. For every Life of Brian I can appreciate decades after I first saw it there are dozens of Dumb and Dumbers that I get maximum enjoyment out of for the time they were intended to be funny.