Well of course they live there; that’s one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s worst designs. They’re not going to live in one of his masterpieces, are they?
70’s architecture and water damage, name a more iconic duo.
But does it come with asbestos fireproofing?
Nah, you don’t need it, the relative humidity is 100%.
It was completed in 1937, not the 70s.
'37, '73, same thing.
Is that really a Frank Lloyd?
Yes, that’s Falling Water.
This is one of the reasons nobody likes movies anymore. Hollywood is so disconnected from the struggle of the working class it’s just sad. The Oscar’s have become a joke
You got me thinking over here.
Perhaps it’s a two way street, and both sides have changed.
It used to be that people wanted to suspend their beliefs for an hour and a half and live in a fantasy. I feel like most people look more for reality and relatability in cinema these days, but Hollywood is still trying to provide the escape.
It’s just not lining up.
My theory is Instagram and “insta-type-influencers” stole that market. It’s glamour fantasy, distilled. Less attention required, no complicated movie stuff in the way. And it gets a lot of eyeballs.
Glamour movie celebs are relics coasting on inertia, hence the constant stories of a $10 million paycheck for one movie being, uh, unsustainable.
Hence, I’m hoping Hollywood has a “medium sized” indie renaissance kinda like gaming is having now. Animation and filming is still pretty expensive, but it feels like tech has to be eroding the mega studio cost advantage.
I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world, but daytime TV in the UK is full of programmes where people want to move house to somewhere a little nicer or chilled - whether it’s to escape the rat race, bring up kids outside of a city, to retire, whatever. They have the strangest “contestants” though, like (and I’m pulling these from my arse but I doubt they’re far from the truth) meeting Tarquin, 44, a part time artist; and Helena, 49, who volunteers at the local farmers market.
“Their budget is 1.2 million pounds”
what the actual fuck
Yeah that’s the House Hunters trope. It’s in the US too on HGTV.
Lisa is a 25 year old retired yoga instructor and Drew is a 28 year old brick layer who does crack in the alley behind his apartment. They are looking to upgrade into a home in the suburbs because Lisa is expecting any day now! Their budget is 3.5 million. Can they find a home?
oh no, they have a bunch of requirements and accidentally spent double their budget on the house but are still just fine somehow
Every single episode of those shows features a couple that has already purchased a house, and they pretend to give them two other choices to “pick” between.
Especially noticeable when they find a fake option that’s a better fit for their wants/needs than the one they actually chose and the same price or cheaper.
Yeah the one episode I watched beginning to end you could see the lady dying inside while touring her actual dream home that cost significantly less than the one they “ended up going with.” I didn’t know that was how the shows were set up so her reactions puzzled me until I learned that fact.
After that I figured that episode was the peak of the genre and never bothered again.
My (half serious) conclusion is the contestants like you describe are either the no-I’m-not-wealthy class of idiots that have simply come from money and don’t realise that’s not the norm, or they’re drug dealers that found a skilled accountant.
I’m under the impression that these shows are designed to make regular people think one or more of the follwiing:
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if you stay in the race long enough and work hard enough, you can attain the same thing
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if you can’t, you’re a failure = go drown your sorrows by being a good consumer.
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be unhappy with their situation and persuaded to blame minorities or the government.
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The fake jobs are euphemisms for having a trust fund.
Yeap, same thing with “find my dream house” shows in America. I think the major difference is that instead of the people being in their 40s, it’s usually people in their 20’s. The source of the funding is ultimately the same, rich parents. The likely difference is between trust fund kids in the US and just people whose parents have finally taken their much awaited dirt naps in the UK.
I think rich parents are basically a prerequisite to owning a home for anyone under 40 nowadays. I’m one of the only people in my friend group of people in their late 30s who owns a home, and that was due to what I consider a minor miracle.
I was lucky and bought an abandoned house from the bank for 30k after the last recession, and that was only possible because I got a loan I probably shouldn’t have qualified for through USAA. So, still a bit of nepotism, but because my dad was in the service, not because he was wealthy.
I don’t mind unrealistic housing as long as it’s not directly referenced. Nothing worse than a character inviting someone into their home saying something like “sorry it’s so cramped” and then the shot reveals a living room large enough to fit my entire apartment.
Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright?
Pretty wild that this house was built in the 1930’s.
Definitely looks a lot newer than that.
80s had a different definition of being a part time mum to 20 kids
LPT from a local: Skip this tourist trap and just go to Ohiopyle down the road for natural rock slides. It is, perhaps, my favourite park.
When I was a kid growing up in the Middle East in the 80s and 90s I idolized the hollywood/US TV western lifestyle. They all seemed so effortlessly lavish and nice. All sitcom/domcom families had large homes and all the kids had their own rooms and those kids didn’t need an allowance. They could get jobs like waitresses or paperboys that earned a half decent pay that allowed them to afford whatever the hell they wanted. I lived in Dubai they forbade all child labor. Even if those laws were ignored in some circumstances, they were generally quite strictly enforced. So unless you were a debt-slave camel jockey kid, you were not going to work at any job.
I legit thought that that was the reality of many people. Even young adult slackers with chronic unemployment issues still somehow had small houses bigger than any apartment I knew. Of course this was myth, and ever since the 2000s rolled along with nearly 40+ years of stagnant wages AND rising costs of everything else meant that that idea is dead.
Grew up in the ghetto of the US.
Would watch Fresh Prince and Family Matters and like “WOW look at that. Their house is so pristine. Everything looks new. Everyone has their own room. People sit at a dining table.”
My house was dark, smelled funny, full of random junk and we’d have mattresses on the floor to fit a large family.
All my hood friends had the same experience. I had friends whose bedroom also their living rooms.
Now I have friends who have a lot of money. 6 figure incomes and everything. Their house is slightly better looking, but that’s about it. Still full of stuff. Messy if you surprise them on a off day.
Average American is no longer the standard for quality living.
Yeah. Movies and TV really painted a highly unrealistic view of American life. Also Hollywood positively sucks at depicting poverty accurately. The home you lived in is something even many poor people in the middle east don’t live in.
This is one of the reasons I hate and ignore all advertising. Commercials have NO IDEA who they are marketing to anymore. All I can think about when any commercial or advert plays is how fucking out of touch the company is to be showing the product getting used in a 26000 sq foot house EVERY TIME. I don’t have a garage, I don’t have a lawn, I don’t have a basement, I dont have a house, I don’t have a dog, I don’t have kids because none of this shit is sustainable or affordable. What world are you marketing to you board rooms upon board rooms of assholes?
If a vacuum cleaner company wants to correctly advertise a vacuum to the masses, they would now have to have the commercial show a lonely man getting off of the night shift of his 3rd job, taking a bus back to his squalor closet of an apartment, and then passing out gazing at the vacuum which has been sitting unused in the corner of the bedroom for 8 months, because the only world where he has the time and energy to use it is in his fucking dreams.
I don’t think Hollywood and advertising are out of touch, they know what they’re doing. They’re not just selling products, they’re selling an ideal. It’s about shaping how people see the world. For working-class viewers, it feels fake because it’s their reality being distorted. But for middle and upper-class audiences, it subtly shifts their perception, makes working-class life look manageable, maybe even confortable. They know it’s not 100% accurate, but they don’t realize how far off it is. That’s the real effect: it makes things look better than they are, and pushes people further out of touch without them realizing it.
I find most video games and other media far more unrealistic in that nobody ever needs to go to the bathroom.
Sounds like you don’t play Ark: Survival Evolved.
Can you imagine taking a dump there
It’s all that tip money.
This is winding me right up. You see people in movies and you think straight away - there is no way you would be able to afford this house/car.
The same goes with them living without any noticeable employment for months. Or having a job but spending their working hours doing something else.
It’s the system working exactly as designed. “you, too, could have all this if you only worked hard enough. Now that you’ve spent 2-3 hours of your weekend off at the movies, get back to work, slave”
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I see you Transformers.
To be fair, Transformers was always product placement. Not just “full of” it, but “entirely built of” it. They designed a line of toys first and made up a story to help sell them afterward.
Hollywood has done irreparable damage to society’s expectation of reality.
And it doesn’t even stop at the financial stuff where someone has an incentive to screw with society’s expectations. All kinds of other aspects like friendships, relationships, parenting,… are strange in movies too.
There’s was a video essay on YouTube about there being less and less sex on TV and in movies and how bad that is. They argued that media should portray all aspects of life realistically; and if sex is left only to porn then it’s going to give people a more and more skewed view with no counterbalance.
That is a good point but they should also just include more awkwardness and in general more of the effort required to keep relationships (of all kinds) working, even the successful ones. That whole “find your soulmate and then coast” nonsense has done a lot of damage to relationships to take just one example.
Agree completely. None of it is well portrayed and the movies that do it well are exceptions. Any movie in which I see a man and woman having alcohol, I know there’s a sex scene coming up. Romance and sex are both so horrendously badly portrayed most of the time that I’m surprised more people don’t complain.
James Bond - typically misogynistic and women are used as Bond pleases.
1st Iron Man movie - serious investigative reporter is reduced to a hot piece of ass for a one night stand as Tony Stark clearly just picks up and sleeps with whoever he wishes.
Star Trek Into Darkness - Kirk is so alpha that the easiest way to portray this is he is in bed with 2 alien women and doesn’t even care as they beg him not to answer the phone and get back to action with them.
Honestly, I think it would already an improvement if the distinction was a bit clearer between wish fulfillment fantasy and supposedly realistic portrayal of relationships.
I don’t mind so much if men and women want fiction with their respective wish fulfillment but don’t pretend that it is realistic.
