#films in general suck so much now from a technical POV...it's like they've forgotten how to do some things

[cinemaocd]

During WW2 there was such a shortage of men, that in one scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Michael Powell had dozens of dummies made up to play extras in a concert. I had watched the scene many times before I heard this anecdote and never noticed that many of the soldiers didn't move or interact with each other at all. It's done cleverly with real actors sprinkled throughout so you don't notice...

Not so much the case watching Poor Things (2023). I noticed that none of the background characters seemed real. Emma Stone walking around in her underwear in Portugal in the 19th century doesn't even warrant a double take or second glance from passersby, when she would have been tackled to the ground and arrested before leaving the hotel lobby in reality. There was a scene in a bar where Mark Ruffalo banged his head on a counter a couple times really hard and no one even looked over at him. It's like they were the background characters in a video game who don't interact with you unless you move to an exact spot on the screen.

While Michael Powell probably would have killed to have the technical ability to do the amazing prosthetic makeup that was done on Willem Dafoe in that movie, he would probably lose his shit over the terrible video game background characters.