Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
I'll just say that SF is extremely alive and well, especially if you're willing to, you know, read books. Charlie Stross is kicking out mind-bending good reads on a regular basis. Lois Bujold's best days may be behind her, but she still wrote some of the best space opera of all time. Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear are still writing, yes? And I would love to hear how you fit a freak like China Miéville into your rant ...

Even if you restrict yourself to film/TV, there are still outstanding examples that buck the formula you're railing against. Children of Men, for example, or Blindness (which was not a good film per se, but very much SF). And I don't understand how Battlestar Galactica fits into your argument, since it was chock-full of flawed, all-too-human characters.

In good SF the speculative element is not used to replace character. Rather, the world is meant to be part of the theme, an aspect of what's being discussed at the heart of the story. It's just a more explicit use of something that's supposed to be there in fiction anyway; the setting as metaphor.

I like The Conversation as much as the next film buff, but I think it's disingenuous to go on about how "They just don't make films like that anymore." The Conversation was not a commercial success, and if you look at articles from the time you'll see that it wasn't even well-reviewed. It was regarded as a flop, an embarrassment. Only decades later do we see it as a groundbreaking film.

It's laughably easy to go back a deacde or four and look at the classics which have emerged and declare, "That's when they knew how to do X." Heck, if you watch VH1 as much as Mrs. Lemur does, you would think that the '80s were nothing but The Cure and Los Lobos, when in fact most of the music on the radio on the '80s was pure junk.

Likewise, the top-grossing film of 1974, the year The Conversation came out, was The Towering Inferno. Other films that were more successful than The Conversation that year: Airport 1975, Herbie Rides Again, Superdad, Earthquake, and Godzilla Versus Mechagodzilla. How easy would it have been in 1974 to declare that the heyday of good movies was over?

Classics get selected over time, and the guano gets washed away. It's deceptively easy to look back at the high points and declare that those were the good years.
Calm down, now, Lemur. You misunderstand what I'm getting at. I'm not talking about books at all; lord knows that Phillip K. Dick alone could vindicate the genre. I'm talking about movies.

Okay, so maybe "The Conversation" was a bad example. Look instead at "The French Connection," or the first "Lethal Weapon" or "First Blood." The latter two, especially, encompass all I am talking about. The original movies had strong characters and were not overwhelmed by their own genres; whereas the sequels, well, were. And look at my post again; I specifically stated that it's not as if everything good has already been done, and everything new is bad -- although I'm surprised you like the new Battlestar Galactica. It feels a bit like a weird soap opera in space to me. There have always been a lot of bad movies, it's just that it seems harder to find the good ones. The 80's music you brought up is a perfect example, actually, because it shows how far you have to dig to get to the good stuff in later decades, whereas you can more easily find popular classics in the earlier eras.

I know you despise this argument, but that doesn't make it completely untrue.

And what do you have against "Herbie Rides Again?"
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
Seriously, though, I cannot fathom how anyone could come up with a movie like the "Herbie" series, with a magical Volkswagen whose name is a euphemism for weed, and not end up with a stoner movie on the level of Cheech and Chong. Herbie Versus Nixon: watch Herbie smuggle half a ton of coke across the border at the height of Operation Intercept! Fun for the whole commune!