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David Plunk's avatar

Another egregious thing about the high budgets is that it's often at the expense of screwing over visual effects artists. The actors/writers/directors and probably some of the crew are unionized and at least in theory have some influence over how much they're exploited by the movie studio.

But visual effects artists aren't (or at least weren't as of recently) and are often overworked and given absurd deadlines to meet. And then they're the ones often singled out for criticism for their work being subpar when in reality they did the best they could under ridiculous circumstances.

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Rachel Baldes's avatar

It feels to me as if the industry has been getting progressively more staid and derivative over the course of the past fifteen years or so? Some of this might just be my own tastes changing in the opposite direction of the version of pop culture Hollywood tends to be centered around. I don't think all of it is explainable by that though. The remakes of remakes, the remakes of sequels, the sequels of remakes, it feels like as long as it's been done before, the impulse is to keep doing it until no one can stand the entire franchise at all. (Whichever one they're doing). There was a period in the 2000's where I really enjoyed a lot of things that came out. Some of them are still favorites. "Eternal Sunshine", "Me, You, and Everyone Else" "Synecdoche, New York" " Being John Malcovich"... what happened?

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