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by Fifer82 3626 days ago
The last "movie" I enjoyed was Terminator 2. Not too long after that, I realised that I had seen all possible combinations of ways that you can tell a story in 90 minutes.

Music Industry and Film Industry have essentially just become about personalities and big money. They can peddle garbage because everyone buys it.

I just hope that books are not next because that is all that remains of quality entertainment.

3 comments

Have you considered looking towards foreign films, which may have a different way of telling a story? Some were popular in the US, like Amélie and Pan's Labyrinth, and of course there's the Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Foreign Language Film.

Less popular ones include those listed at http://the-artifice.com/best-foreign-films-last-15-years/ , like Run Lola Run/Lola rennt, Noi the Albino/Nói albínói, Moolaadé, Second Skin/Segunda Piel and The Celebration/Festen.

No Hollywood film has covered female genital mutilation, which is the topic of Moolaadé, and Festen is part of the Dogme 95 movement,"to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology."

There's also Russian Ark/Русский ковчег, which is a single, uninterrupted, 87-minute take through centuries of Russian history while going through the Winter Palace at the Hermitage Museum. Or any number of other lists of notable foreign films, like http://www.salon.com/2015/01/24/7_must_see_foreign_films_tha... or http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-f... .

Really? You haven't seen any original stories in films after 1991?

To give a counterexample, what about Memento? What had you seen before Terminator 2 that was like Memento?

There's only seven possible plots for books, so I guess they're over too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

I would find it very hard to fit e.g. the Song of Ice and Fire into any of the 7 categories without moving the goalposts.
I know. The "seven basic plots" idea works, but only if you completely ignore the subtly and nuance of story-telling that authors have used most of the time. The point I was making was that you can't just boil every movie since Terminator 2 down to a rehash of what's come before. If the poster I was replying to is going to be over-simplify film plots then you also have to accept we can over-simplify book plots to get to the same point.