It's not just dialog that was efficient. The whole Harvard/Boston setup tells us why he's seduced in a few brief moments. That he can tumble down a street lets the audience know he's athletic enough to hold himself aloft on pipes and jump into a (convenient) truck of cotton. The romance of Ray and Holly Hunter is two lines and hungry leers. The soundtrack is a single piano...
The last movie that made me leave the theatre smiling was Capt. America. Since then, I’ve had less and less reason to go to the movies, and have now reached the point where nothing can get me to go. I think I’m at the point where I might never go again, and just watch at home (where I can take a pee break on these overly long films)...
This is a totally halfbaked theory, but I think this is partially a matter of audience conditioning. When The Firm came out, audiences had three general options for this kind of story -- network drama (some better than others, but mostly sanitized -- this is six years before it was news that Mark Harmon said "shit" on Chicago Hope), arthouse movies (ranging from mildly subversive, obscure stuff to relatively tame Oscar fare that bored a segment of the audience) and mainstream drama films like The Firm.
Mainstream drama films provided some things that network drama couldn't -- they were (hopefully) put together more artfully and featured bigger stars (who weren't constantly in your face and demystified by social media), and also were more "real" or at least transgressive/thrilling because they featured the kind of things that got one, two, or three letter notations when they were eventually shown on HBO (L, N, AS, SSC). And your average adult is probably going to choose to watch Tom Cruise hook up on a business trip to the Caymans and get chased around Memphis by mafia thugs, instead of watching a British actor they kind of recognize in a period piece or Jane Austen adaptation. So mainstream drama was alluring, and there was a big audience for it.
That changed with The Sopranos becoming a massive hit, and all the impact this created through cable and eventually streaming dramas, lasting to this day. The audience for mainstream dramas seemed to get what they needed from these shows in terms of acceptable (or even occasionally superlative) artistry and (perhaps most crucially) adult subject matter. And they were conditioned to expect that. That meant a smaller audience for mainstream drama features and eventually, less of those kinds of movies being made. And now I think audiences don't even expect new mainstream feature dramas to be made anymore, so the the potential audience for them at the moment is minimal. But you are right, with the right approach, that could change.
Maybe you should write a book about all of this and more! This is very good!
It's not just dialog that was efficient. The whole Harvard/Boston setup tells us why he's seduced in a few brief moments. That he can tumble down a street lets the audience know he's athletic enough to hold himself aloft on pipes and jump into a (convenient) truck of cotton. The romance of Ray and Holly Hunter is two lines and hungry leers. The soundtrack is a single piano...
The last movie that made me leave the theatre smiling was Capt. America. Since then, I’ve had less and less reason to go to the movies, and have now reached the point where nothing can get me to go. I think I’m at the point where I might never go again, and just watch at home (where I can take a pee break on these overly long films)...
This is a totally halfbaked theory, but I think this is partially a matter of audience conditioning. When The Firm came out, audiences had three general options for this kind of story -- network drama (some better than others, but mostly sanitized -- this is six years before it was news that Mark Harmon said "shit" on Chicago Hope), arthouse movies (ranging from mildly subversive, obscure stuff to relatively tame Oscar fare that bored a segment of the audience) and mainstream drama films like The Firm.
Mainstream drama films provided some things that network drama couldn't -- they were (hopefully) put together more artfully and featured bigger stars (who weren't constantly in your face and demystified by social media), and also were more "real" or at least transgressive/thrilling because they featured the kind of things that got one, two, or three letter notations when they were eventually shown on HBO (L, N, AS, SSC). And your average adult is probably going to choose to watch Tom Cruise hook up on a business trip to the Caymans and get chased around Memphis by mafia thugs, instead of watching a British actor they kind of recognize in a period piece or Jane Austen adaptation. So mainstream drama was alluring, and there was a big audience for it.
That changed with The Sopranos becoming a massive hit, and all the impact this created through cable and eventually streaming dramas, lasting to this day. The audience for mainstream dramas seemed to get what they needed from these shows in terms of acceptable (or even occasionally superlative) artistry and (perhaps most crucially) adult subject matter. And they were conditioned to expect that. That meant a smaller audience for mainstream drama features and eventually, less of those kinds of movies being made. And now I think audiences don't even expect new mainstream feature dramas to be made anymore, so the the potential audience for them at the moment is minimal. But you are right, with the right approach, that could change.