Vultural said:
Regarding points 3 and 4 ("OCD cinematography" and "OCD lighting"), I find it odd that he painted modern movies as the progenitors of these things.
He pointed to Laurel and Hardy movies (which had fairly crude, albeit perfectly adequate, cinematography) as an example of what movies used to look like many years ago. But while some movies looked like that, there were also others like "Metropolis" (1927), Gone with the Wind" (1939), "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), "Stagecoach" (1939), "Citizen Kane" (1941), "The Black Narcissus" (1947), "The Red Shoes" (1948), "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), "The Searchers" (1956), "Forbidden Planet" (1956), "Vertigo" (1958), "Mary Poppins" (1964), and hundreds of others whose makers went to great lengths to ensure that they were shot and lit in such a manner as to provide a stunning, better-than-reality visual aesthetic. Many such classic movies show a far greater visual perfectionism than the majority of today's movies.
Furthermore, when talking about lighting in horror movies, he mentioned relatively crudely-lit 1970s-1980s movies like "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" as examples of how horror movies used to be lit, in order to contract them with today's more perfectionistic horror movie lighting. But he left out classics like "Frankenstein" (1931) and its sequel "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), "The Wolf Man" (1941), "Cat People" (1942), the 1950s-1960s Hammer classics, and many other pre-1970 horror movies that were impeccably-lit with perfectly-stylized balances of light and shadow.
So these particular stylistic approaches that he is pointing to as typifying modern movies are actually a matter of modern-day filmmakers making visual choices that hearken back to the Golden Age (or at least attempt to). Furthermore, many of the greatest movies of all time had incredibly perfectionistic cinematography and lighting (Welles, Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Curtiz, etc) and were made in an era (one regarded by many as the greatest era of filmmaking, no less) in which that type of perfectionism was the norm in big-budget filmmaking. So trying to frame cinematography and lighting perfectionism as flaws is a strange stance to take.
. In fact it almost feels squeezed into that run-time, when so many ideas are put forward. The editing of the illustrative footage is very good too.
