Tim Sewell

Anyway let's go with this idea, I'll officially start the challenge on the blog at the weekend!

Well yeah, that really shows that I'm wrong when I say that films reflect the social mores of the societies that make them. Doesn't trade on sexist or heteronormative tropes in the slightest!

😂

I'll just add that I am in no way looking down on people who aren't in the 'actual' film/commercial industry. Most of the time I am not there either, and I'm doing corporate work or branded content for local businesses. The resources and gear available today make it possible to create amazing content even as a solo shooter.

However when it comes to improving, those times when I do step in to a larger crew - even if it's just a 1 day TVC shoot, are without a doubt the times when I learn the most.

 

😂

Well yes - there's a reason why, in the *actual* film industry, nearly every DP started as an AC, every gaffer started as a grip/best boy, every producer (actual producer, not exec) started as a runner, PA and line producer. There is absolutely no substitute for hands-on learning surrounded by people who really, really know what they're doing.

😂

Well yes - there's a reason why, in the *actual* film industry, nearly every DP started as an AC, every gaffer started as a grip/best boy, every producer (actual producer, not exec) started as a runner, PA and line producer. There is absolutely no substitute for hands-on learning surrounded by people who really, really know what they're doing.

Well yes - there's a reason why, in the *actual* film industry, nearly every DP started as an AC, every gaffer started as a grip/best boy, every producer (actual producer, not exec) started as a runner, PA and line producer. There is absolutely no substitute for hands-on learning surrounded by people who really, really know what they're doing.

😂

Welcome to show BUSINESS.  I truly hope you don't think you're entitled to have it work the way you want it to work.  You can easily find a niche in it, but if you're condemning the overall market, I'd recommend you pull back your angst a little.
I also worry that too many people conflate the modern diversity trend in filmmaking as solely a sort of social justice woke movement. (One they don't agree with, perhaps?)  I'd suggest anyone that truly believes the industry is going woke because they're compassionate humanitarians, simply ask themselves,  "In a global market what sort of movie has a better chance of appealing to as many people as possible?"  These are business decisions that might be championed as "woke," when, if anything, that woke-bragging is simply a useful marketing ploy to use after the thing is made to increase product awareness. 
Tail, dog, wag.  
As for Netflix, you're basically complaining that Netflix understands it demographic analytics.  Netflix has data vectors on it's viewers that understand modern life better than the people that actually live it.  I mean, c'mon now, the only reason for them to do that is if the entire organization would rather be racist than make as much money as possible.  They want a product they can use.  Offer it to them or, as you indicated, don't.
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-data-science-is-boosting-netflix-785a1cba7e45
Here's a hypothetical:  if it was somehow possible for Disney and it's shareholders to make 200 Billion $$ next year with a 3% annual growth by marketing to, say, aboriginal Pygmies, would they do that in a heartbeat and immediately ignore everyone else?

Unfortunately it's a feature of this world that when one wants other people's money to do something, one has to do it in a way they want. Submit your script, once you have a producer. It may well be the case that if there are no aspects to it that are exclusionary and they like it they'll be interested. Diversity doesn't have to be explicit as in - this character is a black lesbian - but the corollary is true - we can't have 'this character is white'.
At the end of the day, however, it may be better to try to find purely commercial funding for movies that don't fully satisfy the wishes and/or mission statements of publicly-funded bodies (which generally exist to fund projects that can't attract commercial funding).

I'm sorry, but that's simply not the case. There may not be any overt political content or intent, but any cultural product will reflect the politics and generally-accepted ethics of the society that produces it. If a society routinely ignores the experiences and existence, even, of - say - black women, then black women won't be cast because it will never occur to the creators that an individual role could just as easily be played by someone whose ethnicity is other than white. If, when I think of a doctor, I think of a late middle-aged white man - which would reflect my formative experiences of interactions with doctors - then unless I confront that intellectually I wouldn't even notice that I might be being exclusionary in my thinking.
Up until this year, the USA had never had a female Vice President, much less one of colour. If I had been in the happy position of casting a movie about the Presidency back in 1989, would I have even considered that possibility? If I had done and I had cast the role accordingly, would I have been subject to the same criticisms of 'wokeness' that are aimed at people who advocate for a black James Bond, or female Ghostbusters?
Likewise, the vast majority of mainstream films take it as read that the only model of political economy that can be considered normal is that of globalised hyper-capitalism. Any movie that takes that as its basis (which isn't even a decision that gets made) is inherently political, whether we like it or not, as it helps to perpetuate and normalise a system that many could argue, with some validity, is detrimental to both the planet's condition and the pursuit of human happiness. Likewise the countless movies set in suburban nuclear families whose members fulfil the genderised and economic roles expected of them without comment. I'm not saying that there should be comment, but one has to recognise that those movies, as a part of a popular culture, both maintain a status quo that many find stifling while at the same time excluding or invalidating the many alternative family models that we coexist with, or experience, out in the real world.
Shutter Island looks at, among other things, concepts of insanity, the treatment of the mentally ill, notions of personal autonomy and responsibility, corruption and medical ethics. It looks at those things in a period setting, but through the prism of more modern attitudes in those areas. It may not be a film about politics, but politics, past and present, inform its milieu in every possible way.

Not at all, otherwise I wouldn't have linked right to the article discussing it. They literally created quarantine centers where hundreds of thousands of people were made to quarantine, which contradicts your original point. Instead of acknowledging that fact you've decided to try and play semantics which doesn't even help your argument anyway. 
I don't even need to push a "Vermont narrative", the facts and statistics speak for themselves. 

Kudos to you for taking the time to respond to someone who is providing, as a citation, a post from someone called wank_666 - I really couldn't summon the energy.

Kudos to you for taking the time to respond to someone who is providing, as a citation, a post from someone called wank_666 - I really couldn't summon the energy.

Get your facts straight.  There's a difference between losing somebody else's funding (for a whole year! terrible!) and not being rich.  She had six figures for her first feature.  Where do you think it came from?  Who paid for NYU film school?  Do you know how much that costs a year?  And what did she live on the rest of the time?  Prep?  Post-production?  The festival circuit?
And Taika Waititi, to answer another here, is not comparable.  Completely different backgrounds/circumstances.  Are you saying all minorities are the same?  How racist!
Success in the movie business will always require outsized luck, connections and (usually) money.  But if anyone really believes that "Chloe" was offered a $200 million movie on her pitch alone and in the absence of any relevant experience, he/she is in the wrong business.

Medically justified, temporary, standard public health measures aimed at containing a deadly pandemic are not slavery - the view of the world betrayed by such a characterisation is either simplistic or solipsistic.
I'm very sorry for your father's suffering - but really, what is the alternative? Do hospitals allow normal visiting by relatives and friends who may unknowingly be spreading a virus that could kill not only the patient concerned but also many others in the hospital who are highly vulnerable? Or do they devote hours of scarce nursing time helping said visitors to don PPE to a clinical standard?
All of the measures enacted around the world have their basis in the fact that we are faced with a virus that many can spread without even realising they're infected, but which for many others is a death sentence. In other words - they call upon those who in the main can withstand the infection to temporarily undergo some personal detriment - be it economic, social, emotional or to their own mental health in order to protect their fellow citizens who might not be so lucky.
You say it's your right to take the personal risk of getting sick or dying. But what of the health worker treating you who you infect and goes on to die, or to have their life blighted by long Covid? What of the rights of the key worker infected because they have no choice but to continue to work and mix who is denied a hospital bed because you - who was exercising his rights - have taken it up due to entirely avoidable infection? Why do your 'rights' (really just a conviction that you shouldn't be inconvenienced or disappointed along with everybody else) trump theirs?

When I was growing up, in the 1970s, on a wet Sunday or during a winter half-term, if you wanted to watch something on TV there was a very limited choice (in the UK, we only had 3 channels) so at some point one always found oneself watching old black and white movies, old technicolour movies... just old movies. I swear I learnt more about history, humans, social interaction and - importantly in the context of this discussion - storytelling - from those movies.
Now and for a good number of years up to now, kids in that same state of wet-weekend ennui can watch terabytes of 'content' tailored precisely to their sensibilities. They have no need to sit on the sofa and gradually get drawn in to a piece of narrative storytelling made decades before their births. One of the results of this that I've noticed in my own children is that movies I consider to be great pieces of art and entertainment, they find unbearably slow-paced. Modern mass-market films - built on beats - have a 'wow' moment roughly every minute or so. It's a relentless succession of - as @Ed David mentions above - dopamine hits. So obviously the industry, competing against social media, 30 second 'fail' videos and needing to attract and retain the attention of an audience that will switch off anything that features slow burns and subtle inferences, has responded by catering to that need for mindless, incessant thrills (Not saying Hollywodd hasn't always done that, to an extent, but its output now is probably less varied and nuanced than ever before).
Maybe people get a bit more discerning and open to these things as they get older. I hope so. I sometimes feel like large swathes of us have been the subjects of a giant unintentional experiment, the results of which help no-one and are, one-by-one, destroying so many parts of our shared culture that - had we been asked - we would have preferred to keep intact.

Certainly not denying any of that.  You can watch films from 70-90 years ago and notice the same thing.  "It's Wonderful Life" "Sullivan's Travels" "Modern Times" heck even "42nd Street."  And those are the films that have endured.  As I mentioned before, there were a lot of mediocre films from that era that never made it beyond the zeitgeist of their times.  Nothing special that.
On the other hand, the thing that's being challenged in these days by "woke" culture (which I'm not a big fan of, really, just observing) is less the championing of soft socialism, but the cultural entitlement of white dudes.  Thus, imo, a lot of said white dudes are upset they're suddenly being held accountable by new standards...or are seeing their cultural significance diminish...and they're bummed they're not being represented as much as they used to be.  Pretty tragic that, right? [sarcasm]. Can you imagine being pissed because some movie heroes aren't as white and male as you're used to --or want them to be?  
So, I don't know, out of all the problems in the world, being upset with that sort of narrscism seems silly to me.  Maybe some disagree with my assessment there, but that's how I see it.
But, yeah, it's "show business."  The market is simply expanding gender and race variety to attract the global masses.  That's what happens when corporations do things, appeal to as many as possible.  And in that global market melatonin doesn't really count for shit, does it?
Oh well. 

There's always that contrast between mainstream and niche. Boring is subjective and relative, across culture and throughout time. As a child, you found cartoons interesting and the news boring; the inverse is (generally) true as an adult. 
The difference is that the internet has just exponentially increased the amount of media to a wider audience. Of course, the resulting popular media that emerges is quite vanilla--but many people like vanilla. If you're looking for the meaning of life in TikTok videos—that's a you problem. You're looking in the wrong place.
The number of innovative or experimental movies has increased as well. It just takes work to discover them. As it should. As it always has.
Some remember what it was like reach into the unexplored shelves of independent video stores. 
That was sometimes the best part.
 

There's a certain context there.  Personally, I definitely think the implication is "...[used to be free to] say whatever they wanted and be offensive."
I suppose I could be wrong there, let me know if so.
But, it seems to me, maybe some people are ticked-off that a certain traditional privilege/entitlement is now being challenged in a more inclusive society.  And since being a rude self-centered person is being called-out more often it kind of makes those people upset?
If so, I'd ask, is being held accountable to new standards wrong?  Or is it only wrong when folks disagree with the new standards?  How we define these shifts in society is pretty important, I think.

No. It's like saying free people in a country built on genocide and slavery, who daily benefit from that history, shouldn't call themselves enslaved when they're asked to temporarily change their lifestyles in order to save the lives of their neighbours.
 
No. Slavery is a situation where a person or a group of people are forced to labour for no recompense. Some people have concluded that they're in that situation right now because they're too spoilt and entitled to countenance a temporary disruption to their lives in order to save the lives of their neighbours.

No. It's like saying free people in a country built on genocide and slavery, who daily benefit from that history, shouldn't call themselves enslaved when they're asked to temporarily change their lifestyles in order to save the lives of their neighbours.
 
No. Slavery is a situation where a person or a group of people are forced to labour for no recompense. Some people have concluded that they're in that situation right now because they're too spoilt and entitled to countenance a temporary disruption to their lives in order to save the lives of their neighbours.

When I was growing up, in the 1970s, on a wet Sunday or during a winter half-term, if you wanted to watch something on TV there was a very limited choice (in the UK, we only had 3 channels) so at some point one always found oneself watching old black and white movies, old technicolour movies... just old movies. I swear I learnt more about history, humans, social interaction and - importantly in the context of this discussion - storytelling - from those movies.
Now and for a good number of years up to now, kids in that same state of wet-weekend ennui can watch terabytes of 'content' tailored precisely to their sensibilities. They have no need to sit on the sofa and gradually get drawn in to a piece of narrative storytelling made decades before their births. One of the results of this that I've noticed in my own children is that movies I consider to be great pieces of art and entertainment, they find unbearably slow-paced. Modern mass-market films - built on beats - have a 'wow' moment roughly every minute or so. It's a relentless succession of - as @Ed David mentions above - dopamine hits. So obviously the industry, competing against social media, 30 second 'fail' videos and needing to attract and retain the attention of an audience that will switch off anything that features slow burns and subtle inferences, has responded by catering to that need for mindless, incessant thrills (Not saying Hollywodd hasn't always done that, to an extent, but its output now is probably less varied and nuanced than ever before).
Maybe people get a bit more discerning and open to these things as they get older. I hope so. I sometimes feel like large swathes of us have been the subjects of a giant unintentional experiment, the results of which help no-one and are, one-by-one, destroying so many parts of our shared culture that - had we been asked - we would have preferred to keep intact.