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One thing I’ve always appreciated about Asian dramas in general is that they aren’t afraid to be themselves and tell a story without feeling the need to insert ironic humor or social or political fashions. It’s a story, and the needs of the story rule everything else going on. Thus the heroes can be really heroic, the love interests can be love interests, and so on. Western media has a harder time doing this because they have to insert corny ironic humor in the movie so it doesn’t seem super serious. They have to make sure the women in the show are badasses, feminist and not too feminine. Men cannot be too masculine, too competent, or if they happen to start that way, they must “learn their lesson” by the start of the third act.
Add in the insular world of movies and TV in which everyone has the same background, the same training, and are expected to follow “Save The Cat” to the letter, and I think it’s just a mess. Nobody can create an honest account of redneck masculinity because nobody in Hollywood comes from that background. If you’re going to film school and have the funds in hand to be effectively unemployed for 3-5 years, you’re not from anything like a working class background and more than likely have never had a ten minute conversation with someone from a working class background. It’s PMC class second sons all around and all they can do is ape media portrayals of things they’re generations away from first hand knowledge of. Here Be There Dragons.
I frequently see this blamed on Joss Whedon, but I think I've come to the conclusion that it's actually cargo-cult writers trying to capture the "quippy" vibe that his productions are famous for. But kind of like Michael Bay, the imitators fall well short of the greatness of the original. Not to say that Bay is the best filmmaker, but attempts to mimic his style (briefly: "make every single shot as awesome as possible") often don't really manage to make awesome shots, especially consistently.
Having re-watched some of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly recently, the quips are there, but they're not usually shallow "lol, so random" jokes: they tend to be deeper cross-references to scenes from far earlier in threads that span an episode or more. Imitations of this tend to just drop jokes randomly and assume they'll land, but, done properly, there's an established setup and payoff. I would cite specific examples, but I doubt any of them are well-enough known to make sense out-of-context.
That’s definitely a part of it, but it was also rare at the time. Like any other trope, you can only put it out there so many times before it becomes tiresome. I’m finding myself so bored with the trope that it no longer lands at all. Even the “save the world” trope of action movies seems a bit played out because it’s all that’s out there and eventually you no longer care about the world.
Hasn't that been a trope-complaint for, well, decades at this point?
Seems practically cyclic to me. New franchises come, and are often at their most intense / highest fan momentum when the stakes are relatively small. To go back just a few decades- Pokemon when Ash was a rookie trainer trying to advance to the first championship, Bleach's Soul Society arc when it was just rescuing a friend from an unjust execution, Naruto when it was orphan wants to be ninja president and has a team rival, My Hero Academia when super-power-less kid gets into super-school and has to keep up, etc.
A lot of series crest around the time that the stakes start to raise the stakes so high that it's narratively impossible for them to lose.
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It makes sense that people might have to binge-watch all of Firefly before they'd be able to understand your analysis, but I'm confused ... you seem to consider this a bad thing?
I don't consider it a bad thing, but the examples that come to mind would probably not be easy to explain if the reader hadn't seen the episodes in question. Something like the recurring use of "special" in the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" as part of an ongoing dialog between Book and Mal about morality, at least once in the presence of other characters unaware of the context.
EDIT: The famous "I'm always angry" line from The Avengers is probably also an example. As a line, it's cute and quippy, but it lands as the payoff for having spent a decent chunk of the movie trying to keep The Hulk under control: it's a cathartic release in that the anger is well-placed and actually helpful, and also shows that Banner has grown into at least some control of the transition. But in subsequent movies it's basically played for laughs that the two characters in the same body have come to peace -- without the setup, it feels much cheaper to me.
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The Avengers and the resulting effects on the tone of the MCU have ruined an entire generation of writers. It worked too well and not enough people noticed that that was mostly because it was within the context of a comic book movie with an ensemble cast. Which is seemingly the only thing Whedon can write: genre fiction with ensemble casts.
Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.
I've often wondered if the entire media landscape might be unrecognizably different if Whedon doesn't get that particular writing gig.
Nothing about Snyder's work before DCEU implies that he had to take a turn to go where he did. I think that's just who he is. I sometimes even appreciate his clear disdain for certain allegedly immovable parts of DC canon
And who he is is someone who should never have been given control of an entire cinematic universe. Zach Snyder being allowed to act as some sort of auteur or writer-director when his best works like 300 were mainly strong on visuals and he needs at least two tries to make a decent superhero movie is one of the more amazing coups in Hollywood
He really must just be a great guy to be around.
His visual flair and dubious auteur credentials aside, do you not think that the grimdark tone was reactionary? Watchmen, Sucker Punch or even his recent Rebel Moon antics, while still retaining his style were nowhere near as pompous as a Batman v Superman or even a Man of Steel.
He does have an unearned tendency to take himself way too seriously, especially now that he's selling director cuts, but I am utterly convinced that some producer shenanigans were involved to get to "do you bleed" levels.
He said this before getting Man of Steel:
So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?
My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.
Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.
Snyder was still more respectful of Watchmen in his movie adaptation than whoever is responsible for the hbo series, showing just how low fidelity has fallen.
The HBO series was fucking weird and the female lead was a good actress, but that world was just so tortured in its framing that nothing about it made sense. Vigilante police, reparations, the Klan, nightmare squid storms... its just such a baffling show so far up its own ass that there it took until the penultimate episode to figure out what the central conflict of the show was.
Everyone despises JJ Abrams Mystery Box attitude to storytelling now, but the overly convoluted framing also is Damon Lindlehofs doing. His grubby fingers are good for kneading slow burning plots like The Leftovers, but most of the time he works just collapse in the bake.
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