I used to be a nuke Hollywood from orbit guy. A few years ago, I tripped (entirely accidentally) over a very good movie that I only watched because it dealt with a subject of interest to me and about which I already knew the backstory. It confounded all my expectations.
At that point, I realized that I had developed a huge blind spot and I started exploring. (Being retired is good for this sort of thing.) The streaming networks now dominate the industry and have an insatiable 24/7/365 appetite for content. More is being filmed today than ever before. But the streamers have a quantity over quality bias and are producing a lot of basically mediocre tv, leavened by a scattering of tentpoles that get most of the marketing attention and create most of the controversy. And you are right; the industry’s leftward tilt infects some of what is produced. But not all of it.
Finding the good stuff in the content firehose is a challenge. I always scan the many movie threads on FR looking for recommendations (and also because I enjoy the robust criticism of the questionable stuff). I read a lot of reviews, pay attention to festival selections, and glance at critics’ best of/most overlooked/most overlooked lists. I’m always looking for the hidden gems.
I also maintain a movie ping list, which I try (with occasional exceptions) to keep focused on the good stuff that we’ve seen. Many of us are starved for leads, and we are now in an environment in which the streamers have siloed many films on platforms to which many of us lack access.
I’m not obsessive about it, but I do find it’s worth an effort to be an active consumer seeking out good films, as opposed to being a passive viewer checking to see whatever the streamers’ algorithms serve up next. I’ll be glad to add you to the movie ping list if you want. It’s painless.
Please add me. Thanks. We keep a list of the movies we’ve seen on TV, rented through the library or borrowed from family. We don’t stream at all and only watch certain shows and have given up a few we did like until they went homosexual (like 2 dudes rolling around together in bed like on New Amsterdam). Can’t watch it. And I don’t like that they show it during primetime. Anyway, we have become a little picky with our viewing. We were on limited data for years until a couple month ago and we were finally offered a decent deal from our carrier.