Love that people complain about the length of movies while simultaneously happily siting through eight, hour+ long episodes of Stranger Things over two evenings.
Especially when many hours could have easily been left on the cutting room floor of most streaming shows, but they need to streeetch the runtime so that the writers can meet their contractual, or whatever other internal requirements.
My favorite is when they they say something like “it starts getting good in season 3”. Like I’m going to watch tens of hours of a show that kind of sucks just to see if it actually starts getting good or not?
Of course, the reality is that they aren’t really watching the show like I would - as in, they aren’t sitting down and giving it their undivided attention. The show is on, but they’re also on their phones the entire time, or it’s on in the background and they are doing something else, or whatever. Probably one of the reasons why the show feels like it’s full of filler - they need to make sure that someone that’s only sort of paying attention can still follow what’s going on.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually true.
Love that people complain about the length of movies while simultaneously happily siting through eight, hour+ long episodes of Stranger Things over two evenings.
Because a movie is a constant continuation, where as each episode has a hard end and you can stop and decide if you want to continue or stop.
Except that if you look at the stats, most Netflix viewers binge watch (88% here), and most engage in long binges (70% here reported 5 episodes or more at a time), binge watching is by all accounts ‘the norm’ for streaming service users.
So while you may be able to ‘decide if you want to continue or stop’ the statistics show that the vast majority of people end up watching much, much longer than a movie runtime - which was my point.
People tend to be more willing to do a lot of something if it’s broken up into smaller parts.
As an example, my great-grandmother used to always cut desserts and appetizers into smaller sizes if she noticed they weren’t being eaten. No one would take a large slice of cake but lots of people would take a small slice and then another small slice after. My grandmother took that advice from her and so did my mom, and it really does work very well. Same applies to movies and tv shows.
thumbnail of The Brutalist (4 hrs long) okay perhaps not the best example
And not exactly 4 hours of easy watching.
It’s not for the Marvel crowd but it’s an amazing movie wIth world class cinematography and it sucks you in.
It didn’t seem like 4 hours at all to me.
yeah i didn’t regard it as a particular difficult film at all.
but people are different and at different levels. tons of people in this thread seem to flip out at the notion some films aren’t for everyone. not everyone reads at the same grade level, but for some reason the idea of films being at different levels is very offensive to folks.
running a marathon is a lot harder than running a mile. and we have people who can’t run a mile telling us marathons are stupid and shouldn’t exist.
Thanks for explaining that different people like different movies. Truly groundbreaking stuff, right up there with the marathon metaphor.
i mean some of the movies film professors pick, i had trouble sitting through, uh, 20-30 years ago (that is not an estimate i was one of those students) so is this on the professors? what are the films?
You want to re-calibrate from the constant barrage of content? Find a way to watch The Wrath of God its a good movie that opens with a series of 30 second set shots of water flowing. Its like anti-transformers level of stillness
Hey chadGPT, summarize this Fellini for me.
Great question, let’s dig into this! Federico Fellini’s 8½ is a sequel to his previous hit film Se7en, and its protagonists are a group of eight friends. One of the friends becomes a father, and his baby counts as the “½” in the title. The group gets into various crazy adventures, such as being a failed film director, fantasising about hot women, having mommy issues, and hating religion. The overall message may be summarised as: friendship is magic.
Do you have any further questions on French New Wave films?
When movies become great again (MMGA) then we will watch them with rapture attention.
What we have now are filmmakers who are attempting to remake the magic of films from their childhood (when films represented a kind of currency, or surplus value) or else draw us into a retrospective continuation of filmia-as-philosophy. Like scripture vs. apologetics (if one can follow).
Late-medieval and European-rennaissance art was actually reactionary, prescriptive, imitative craftsmanship. What we often conceptualize as masterpiece is actually imitation (Roman classical-cum-Greek, Van Eyk, etc…), which falls far short of the truly revolutionary. We remember film as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle version of painting-as-art, when it was historically nothing more than coding (presentation).
Which means we have an artwork which is imitating an artwork, which was an imitation. Which is boring. And people who want a job in that industry are willing to observe the small number of instances in which true artistic innovation was evident, but don’t actually believe they will be permitted to engage in such exploration. Which is boring and trite.
