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I'd like to congratulate Bobby as this year's recipient of the coveted Damn Kids Get Off of My Yard prize.
He is also a great Novelist... I am working on writing condensed versions of those posts so they can be read in just minutes. You ask why??? It's so I can stay home and not go out and spend ever more money at the stores. And... the only thing reasonable thing here in Nashville actually happens to be concerts!
For some, the cost is a factor for sure. For most people though, I don't buy it. People tend to find a way to afford what they want to afford.
Too many people like to spend money they just don't even have. Credit card debt in the US is hitting new all time highs. One of my relatives is drowning in credit card debt because he is a compulsive spender and apparently does not know how to math.
Many millions of Americans are living beyond their means, trying to project an image of being more wealthy and successful than they are in reality. Buying over-priced homes and over-priced vehicles is a big part of that.
I am deeply worried what the year 2024 may have in store for the economy. Consumers are getting maxed out and deeper in the red. Even some businesses are getting into trouble, namely ones heavily vested in real estate. A commercial real estate apocalypse could take place in big cities around the country. Office vacancies are way up in places like New York City -thanks in part to office rent prices being too damned high and much faster Internet technology making it no longer necessary to do big business in person in the big city. The interest rates on commercial real estate properties reset every few years. It's not like having a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. A bunch of these office tower owners may be drowning in red ink by this time next year. They have far less rental income coming in but the payments on their towers is going to skyrocket. Pretty simple math.
Us taxpayers will probably be asked to bail them out. Again. It seems like no one learned a Goddamned thing from the mid 2000's.
Originally posted by Martin McCaffery
I'd like to congratulate Bobby as this year's recipient of the coveted Damn Kids Get Off of My Yard prize.
Because I don't like people showing up to the gym wearing crocs or wearing their pajamas to the grocery store?
There's one heavy-set jerk that comes to the Lawton Family YMCA always stinking like he hasn't had a shower in days. It's disgusting. I'm not an arch-conservative person with a giant stick up my ass. At the same time I don't think it's too much to ask for people to practice some basic hygiene. Anyone should have mastery of personal cleanliness while they're still in elementary school.
Bobby wrote: The cost of a concert ticket to see a currently relevant band is fucking insane. Even ticket costs to see an old dinosaur band with maybe one or two original members is ridiculous. Lawton is a military town (Fort Sill next door) and it had a LOT of bars and night clubs. I think more than half of them have closed. My theory is quite a few young adults have just "retreated to the bunker" and are living through their computers, phones, video game consoles, etc. They're not leaving the house to socialize as much as they did in the past.
My granddaughter is a singer-songwriter who plays small clubs - venues I've never heard of which have acts I've never heard of (acts not even played on public radio Alternative or AAA stations). Anecdotal, but the surprise is that even on a weekday night, these places get big crowds of young people. I'm always amazed when I see this. In NYC, these places aren't in Manhattan, but in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Ridgewood in Queens, etc. And these places are affordable, generally with admission prices of $12 to $25 (although drinks are expensive). So anecdotally, youngish people do seem to be going out, but to experiences that they can't replicate at home. Also, even late at night, the streets of midtown Manhattan have been jammed, mostly with young people and up until now, it hasn't even really been the holiday season yet with tourists. (That begins starting around 12/20.) Maybe it's different in smaller cities and towns.
I've been arguing for a long time that the reason we have so many superhero movies is because older people were no longer showing up for intelligent, adult films. I based that on the fact that films released in 2022, such as Death on the Nile, Cyrano, Nope, Amsterdam, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fablemans, She Said and The Menu all didn't gross well. And I think grosses to date this year also represent that - we're still running about 18% behind pre-pandemic 2019 and 2019 wasn't even that great a year. But while the following is anecdotal (and not data), I went to see Maestro Tuesday night at the Netflix Paris theater (529 seats) and it was practically sold out for a film that everyone knows is going to be streaming on Netflix in a few weeks. And then yesterday, I went to a 2pm show of Poor Things and was surprised to see a great crowd for that time of day - theater was about half full. So anecdotally, maybe adults at least, are starting to return to theaters.
(And by the way, I have to give Netflix some credit: the presentation at the single-screen Paris was fantastic. Movie scores playing before the movie, no ads, just two trailers, curtains that opened and closed before the feature and screen masking, although they didn't mask down to the 1.33 frame of most of the film. The seating did feel crowded, but it felt like a single screen theater and brought back the past for me. AMC claims all new 4K Cinionic Laser projectors at the theaters I patronize. I don't know what the Paris was using, but it looked far better. And yet, the Paris, while owned by Netflix, seems to be operated by BowTie, which frequently did not have a good reputation. Also interestingly, much of both The Maestro and Poor Things were in black & white. A new trend?)
Too many people like to spend money they just don't even have. Credit card debt in the US is hitting new all time highs. One of my relatives is drowning in credit card debt because he is a compulsive spender and apparently does not know how to math.
Many millions of Americans are living beyond their means, trying to project an image of being more wealthy and successful than they are in reality. Buying over-priced homes and over-priced vehicles is a big part of that.
I am deeply worried what the year 2024 may have in store for the economy. Consumers are getting maxed out and deeper in the red. Even some businesses are getting into trouble, namely ones heavily vested in real estate. A commercial real estate apocalypse could take place in big cities around the country. Office vacancies are way up in places like New York City -thanks in part to office rent prices being too damned high and much faster Internet technology making it no longer necessary to do big business in person in the big city. The interest rates on commercial real estate properties reset every few years. It's not like having a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. A bunch of these office tower owners may be drowning in red ink by this time next year. They have far less rental income coming in but the payments on their towers is going to skyrocket. Pretty simple math.
Us taxpayers will probably be asked to bail them out. Again. It seems like no one learned a Goddamned thing from the mid 2000's.
Because I don't like people showing up to the gym wearing crocs or wearing their pajamas to the grocery store?
There's one heavy-set jerk that comes to the Lawton Family YMCA always stinking like he hasn't had a shower in days. It's disgusting. I'm not an arch-conservative person with a giant stick up my ass. At the same time I don't think it's too much to ask for people to practice some basic hygiene. Anyone should have mastery of personal cleanliness while they're still in elementary school.
I fear that your 2024 economic prediction will come closer to happening than not happening. There is an epidemic that started probably in the 90s of a lot of people just spending whatever they feel like spending on credit cards and figuring they'll deal with it later. It's a big part of why Disney World keeps jacking up prices and people still go in droves. They don't really care what it is costing.
They just figure that worst case, they'll file bankruptcy, wait a few years for it to be off of their credit report and start again.
My wife (who isn't a grumpy old man) also comments on the inappropriate wearing of pajamas in places like Walmart. We don't need to dress up for a baseball game like it's the 1920s but there is a happy medium of appropriate dress when out in public.
I went to see Maestro Tuesday night at the Netflix Paris theater (529 seats) and it was practically sold out for a film that everyone knows is going to be streaming on Netflix in a few weeks. And then yesterday, I went to a 2pm show of Poor Things and was surprised to see a great crowd for that time of day - theater was about half full. So anecdotally, maybe adults at least, are starting to return to theaters.
Manhattan is a pretty unique movie-going market in terms of demographics. It doesn't surprise me at all that a movie like Maestro would fill the Paris theater in Manhattan. Book the same movie at a cinema in Oklahoma City and it would be playing to smaller crowds. Booked into a theater here in Lawton the show would be lucky to sell more than a handful of tickets.
Gentrification has swept across much of NYC's five boroughs. The idea of "affordable" neighborhoods is all relative to who is living there and their income level. Still, Manhattan is quite a bit more expensive than Brooklyn or Queens overall. Young adults will show up to certain night spots or concert events just about anywhere if enough conditions are right.
Pretty much the only concerts I go to anymore are just gigs for underground bands at local bars here in Lawton or sometimes up in Oklahoma City. The cover charges (if any) are usually pretty reasonable.
One of the casinos here in Lawton, as well as a few other casinos in this region, like to book old "dinosaur" bands. WinStar is a big enough venue (fucking enormous really) that it can book some current era performers too. Dinosaur band or not, they're often wanting $80 or more for an ordinary seat. Tickets are hundreds of dollars (or even thousands) to see a band that is currently popular nationally or globally. There are certain rock and alternative bands I like a lot, but I'm not blowing the equivalent of a house payment to see any of them perform live. Apparently enough other people are willing to do that. Otherwise the prices wouldn't be so outrageous.
Originally posted by Martin Brooks
I've been arguing for a long time that the reason we have so many superhero movies is because older people were no longer showing up for intelligent, adult films.
One reason why this is happening is many people put movies into two categories: movies they want to see on a big screen in a commercial cinema and other movies that good enough to merely watch on TV. The movies lumped into the TV watching category are indeed those "grown up" dramas and comedies. They'll go the cinema to watch big action set pieces and sequences with lots of expensive visual effects. The cinema gets to function as a sort of amusement park. Those silly D-Box seats and concepts like Screen-X play into that. Who wants to buy D-Box tickets for "Maestro?"
Originally posted by Lyle Romer
My wife (who isn't a grumpy old man) also comments on the inappropriate wearing of pajamas in places like Walmart. We don't need to dress up for a baseball game like it's the 1920s but there is a happy medium of appropriate dress when out in public.
Exactly. I'm not asking for people to wear dress casual attire to Walmart. Most of the time I'm rocking the jeans and t-shirt look. But it's still actual clothing to wear outdoors in public. People wearing pajamas, bath robes, etc out in public just make me ask all sorts of questions. Did they not have any clean clothes to wear? Did they just get out of bed? Have they taken a shower? Did they even bother to wipe their ass after taking a dump? Just doing the basics looks like too much work for them.
Our "downtown" seems to have pretty much moved out to be beside the highway.
Twenty years ago the downtown was the activity center of the town. Now a lot of the stuff that used to be downtown (including a grocery store and most of the restaurants) have relocated to be beside the highway so now there's little reason for anyone to go downtown any more unless you're going to the bank or the post office.
I can walk from here to the post office in the mid-afternoon (about four blocks) and not see a single soul on the sidewalk.
Same here. We still have a downtown but it's pretty much dead after 9pm. Used to be things weren't really getting STARTED until then. Now, you can go stand in the middle of our main drag on Saturday at 10pm and not see any moving vehicles in either direction. It's sad, partly because people don't seem to know how much fun it used to be to go downtown! If they did, they'd still be going.
There's a certain local bar here which has been a downtown mainstay for my whole life. The owners are a couple years older than me. The pandemic really took it out of them. They used to serve great food and were a gathering point in town -- you would go there before going wherever the dance band(s) were playing. Now, they took all the food out; they are only open four nights a week, and they usually close by 10:00 pm. They really need to sell the place to somebody younger who is more "hungry," but what else are they gonna do? The bar is most of their whole social life, it seems. (Probably the same reason I'm still in the movie business, if I'm really honest with myself.) Plus, I've heard they think that bar is worth a million bucks, but I think they're delusional about that.
I'm not going to say Montgomery, AL is a swinging hot spot, but the downtown has changed immensely for the better in the almost 40 years I have been here. There are lots of reasons for it. Back in 85 when I arrived, we had a crypto-fascist mayor for life who decreed that the downtown would close up around sunset, and should only be populated by the civil servants who worked in all of the various government jobs a state capitol provides. Let everyone else go to Birmingham or something. Eventually we got Mayors - of both parties - who actually invested in downtown and recruited and encouraged new and diverse businesses. All of the projects of Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative bring thousands of tourist downtown annually. The deceased former mayor would have done everything in his power to have stopped EJI. I'm not going to say I've been 100% on board with all of the political choices, but at least Montgomery's downtown is not the abandoned wasteland it was back then.
Military towns (like Lawton, OK) have traditionally had more than their fair share of bars, night clubs and other establishments with more naughty forms of entertainment. My dad's first duty station in the Marines was Camp Lejeune. When we first moved to Jacksonville, NC we stayed in a crappy, rat-infested little motel for a few weeks waiting for our quarters in Midway Park to open. There was a drive-in theater next door and it showed porno movies in addition to other R-rated stuff. My dad and a some of his Marine buddies would drink beer and watch the screen from the back yard. My mother wouldn't let me or my brother play in that back yard after dark.
During that same period in the beginning of the 1970's Lawton was at its most dirty and dangerous level in history. The downtown area had lots of bars and even a good number of strip clubs. But to hear some older guys who grew up in this city describe it, Lawton's night life was at its best back then. There were people driving down from OKC to party here.
Various city leaders were determined to "clean up" Lawton. Their solution: this new thing at the time called a mall. The indoor mall down in Hurst, TX was one of the first of its kind. They even filmed parts of the movie Logan's Run there. The city razed 12 square blocks worth of properties to build Central Mall and drafted a number of other ordinances in the late 1970's. Lawton's downtown area has been dead after dark ever since.
The topless bars and other night clubs didn't disappear. They just spread out to other parts of town. Starting in the 1990's the strip clubs started dying off one by one. Today there is just one of them left West of town and I think it might be off limits to military personnel by orders of Fort Sill's CG. So many other bars and night clubs have shut down here in just the past 10 years.
We still have plenty of crime, including shootings. But those are usually from one of three scenarios: domestic dispute, escalated fights at a house party or drug/gang-related activity.
But there is a great deal of down-ward pressure against young adults socializing and "hooking up." The cost of living in relation to local wage levels is nuts. There is a bunch of young adults who can only afford to be single. They might be stuck living with parents or they may be sharing an apartment with other roommates. Neither situation is good for a serious romantic relationship, especially one headed for marriage. Single people are intensely scared of unplanned pregnancies (correction: even married couples are scared too as well). I believe blow-back from things like the "me too" movement have made people more cautious at making romantic overtures to someone. People are seeking refuge in social media and computerized things. But loneliness is spreading.
While speaking with reporters about his film Poor Things earlier this fall, director Yorgos Lanthimos took a moment to address the spicy elephant in the room.
"Why is there no sex in movies anymore?" the Greek filmmaker wondered. He was being somewhat facetious — his latest feature stars Emma Stone as a dead Victorian woman who, after being brought back to life by a mad scientist, sets forth on her journey toward sexual liberation.
The story is funny, the nudity is plentiful — and per Stone, who was also a producer on the film — the sex scenes serve the story "in such an important way."
Lanthimos' film — and his qualms — come just as a recent study from UCLA found that a good chunk of Gen Z just doesn't really want to see sex in TV and movies anymore.
Of young people surveyed between the ages of 13 to 24, 47.5 per cent think sex isn't needed for plot development in TV shows and movies. (Pause here for collective gasp.)
Meanwhile, movie critics and filmmakers are increasinglybemoaning that mainstreamfilm has become sexless — or at the very least, prudish in its portrayal of sex.
A 2019 report in Playboy used IMDB data to conclude that the 2010s saw the fewest sex scenes on screen since the 1960s. It should be noted that the Hays Code era — a period of Hollywood censorship that forbade the depiction of sex in cinema, along with other taboos — lasted from 1934 until 1968.
Critics and filmmakers shared their theories as to why the younger generation might be rejecting sexy cinema and why depicting sex on screen is important.
'Gratuitous and grotesque' sex scenes
Gabrielle Drolet, a culture writer and cartoonist in Montreal who is in her mid-twenties, said it's "so common to see sex depicted in a way that feels really frivolous."
"I'm thinking of shows like Euphoria, or to name another Sam Levinson show, The Idol, where there were so many sex scenes [that] were so gratuitous and grotesque, almost, and unnecessary."
But she noted that dismissing all sex scenes would mean that "we're missing out on a pretty big part of the human experience and how people experience their relationships."
Drolet was surprised to see the strong reaction provoked by a sex scene in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Oppenheimer this summer.
The scene set the internet aflame (or rather, gave it a cold shower), as some viewers mocked it for showing the nuclear physicist rather morbidly reciting to his lover the line from Hindu scripture's the Gita that he later became associated with: Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
"It's really common to see violent scenes," said Drolet. "But as soon as sex comes up, that becomes a really big complicated issue, whereas we're so desensitized to everything else."
Several movies released this year that were sold to audiences based on their raunchiness or sensuality seemed to lack sex appeal in their execution.
Take the Jennifer Lawrence flick No Hard Feelings, a sex comedy that didn't feature much sex, or the recent TV adaptation of Fatal Attraction, which updated its gender politics for a modern audience but fell short of its steamy, sweaty forebearer in the sex scene department.
Canadian director Molly McGlynn's upcoming film Fitting In, about a teenage girl diagnosed with a reproductive disorder that turns her life — and sex life — upside down, said she wanted to explore the emotion of sex in her movie, not the mechanics.
"The intersection of what I'm seeing in culture about what being a woman is and how sexuality relates to that is really kind of interesting," she told CBC News, noting the range between a film like Poor Things, which celebrates a sexually liberated woman, in contrast to the Barbie movie, in which the protagonist doesn't have or desire sex at all.
McGlynn wondered whether young people are less interested in sex on screen overall, or if they're tired of seeing "gratuitous sex" and nudity, especially as societal expectations around marriage and children evolve.
"It does make sense to me that the focus has maybe shifted to relationships because [younger generations] have, I think thankfully, been able to question whether a romantic or sexual relationship is the be-all-end-all that we have been sold."
Youth crave more storylines about friendships
While Gen Z might be less interested in media portrayals of sex, the UCLA study found that among those surveyed, just over half wanted to see more storylines about friendships and platonic relationships in media.
"When you think about how often romantic relationships are layered into our narratives, sometimes that can feel maybe a little bit extraneous, when what you're searching for is connection [that] is platonic," said Stacy Lee Kong, the Toronto-based editor of pop culture newsletter Friday Things.
"We talk about it as like this puritan idea of 'The youth are so conservative. The youth don't like sex,' " said Kong, noting that the pandemic limited the number of "third spaces," a term used to describe locations outside of home, school or work where people can socialize freely.
"They don't have that, and so they're looking for that from their pop culture," she explained.
Despite "religious people" who say that today's movies are full of sex and violence, there hasn't REALLY been a lot of sex in mainstream movies in many, many years. There's no problem with a love scene in which, right at the time they're starting to get naked, the scene fades to black or cuts to the next morning. There's not really a huge reason to show them actually bumping uglies, unless it's integral to the story. I think the biggest reason there aren't more nude or sex scenes is, these days people just don't want to show their naked selves on screen. Again, if it doesn't serve the story, there's no big need to see Jennifer Lawrence or whoever naked, however appealing that notion might be.
Decades ago conventional Hollywood movies used to have the most edgy sexual oriented content one could see on screen (without having to risk personal safety or embarrassment visiting a porno palace).
Hollywood movies no longer have "the edge" when it comes to sexual content and sexual related story lines. Theatrical releases are easily outdone by what can be shown on pay TV. The stuff I'm talking about isn't porn either. The sex scenes are simulated. But cable TV networks and streaming services can air shows with scenes that will get any Hollywood movie hammered with a NC-17 rating.
Then there's the matter of easily and freely accessible hardcore porn at various web sites. If someone wants to see a truly graphic sex scene they can pull up one of those web sites. Watching an acted sex scene in a movie is very tame by comparison. There is no shock value to seeing a sex scene in a conventional movie anymore. A lot of the movie-going public has been desensitized to it. Why even bother putting such a scene in a movie?
I think sex still has its place in movies, but more than ever it really needs to serve the story. The scene will be a total waste of time if it is just put in a movie gratuitously.
The whole plot of the movie "Logan's Run" was based on hedonism and sex but you hardly saw a naked body throughout the entire film.
Of course, I like sex (in movies) as much as anybody but it's the finer points, anticipation and titillation that make it interesting to watch. Today's movies don't have that same style and I don't find it as satisfying to watch. Nowadays, clothes come off, people do the deed then the show is over.
In Logan's Run, the whole movie was saturated with such a level of erotic anticipation that the "Love Shop" scene was almost anti-climactic. As legend has it, the scene was cut down from the original shooting in order to tone down the sexual imagery but it still ended up being one of the most iconic "sex scenes" in movie history.
Nowadays, it would, likely, be impossible to remake a movie like Logan's Run or Barbarella, not because sex is taboo but because people, these days, just don't know how to portray eroticism on screen, anymore.
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