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I know I’m not the average movie-goer, but I strongly prefer to see movies at either end of the spectrum: really bad or really good. Those are usually experienc

• deleted 8y ago
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• Phenomenit 8y ago
  Agreed, every movie I've been to for the last 2-3 years have been boring not terrible, just utterly boring and a waste of time and money. Compared to other mainstream art forms, movies have a higher barrier of entry and that translates in to smaller influx of new and interesting concepts.
  • Stunting 8y ago
    Then you are going to the wrong movies friend. Which is to say, you are victim to assuming the mega complex Movie Theater, powered by the mega complex of Studios pumping out advertisements are the only option available to you. If cinema is a desirable experience to you, seek out film colleges, independent theaters, movie rental spots, and YouTube/Vimeo/reddit. You’ll find a bunch of crap, for sure, but it will be new and interesting crap. You’ll explore your own mind trying to define why you don’t like it. Eventually you’ll see something truly moving and that will be amazing! Or, If you justly say “I don’t have time or energy for something I’m not that passionate about,” continue to go to the AMCs. Just recognize, much like McDonald’s they (and the studios) have massive overhead and massive interest in not losing money. No one takes the person complaining that McD’s isn’t gourmet very seriously. (The most moving zombie movie I ever saw was 15mins on YouTube and had 3 zombies in it..)
    • scottlocklin 8y ago
      Movies used to be better without having to go for the art school/criterion outlets. Cf the entire pre-Star Wars 1970s oeuvre which mostly managed to be relatively highbrow and entertaining in a way that they haven't since then.
      • JetSpiegel 8y ago
        That's because the duds are filtered through time and forgetfulness. Rose tinted glasses of memory. Nobody remembers the boring movies from their childhood.
        • Stunting 8y ago
          This! Not to mention that at the time, people HATED Ewoks.
        • scottlocklin 8y ago
          Erm I didn't watch those movies when I was a kid, and I certainly wouldn't be able to appreciate them if I had. I watched almost all of them as an adult within the last 4-6 years.
          • JetSpiegel 8y ago
            Me too, but that's not the point. We are not watching a random sample of old films, we only watch the old hits. We are watching a random sample of present films.
            • scottlocklin 8y ago
              I don't think I am watching the old hits! I watch a lot of forgotten trash, and I like that stuff too. It's still way better than capeshit or whatever it being hawked these days. Video nasties by Hammer, weird pirate movies written by Peter Benchley, Charlie Bronson movies, Oliver Reed movies, Doug McClure movies... A lot of the older film noir stuff I watch is definitely filtered by time: but you can pick any random garbage from between 65 and 75 and it's likely to be decent.
• Pfhreak 8y ago
  I have your same criteria. I justify it this way, "We live in an era where the amount of 'pretty good' media being produced outstrips my ability to consume it -- even if I were to dramatically increase my viewing/reading/playing time. Therefore, I try to select only the media that's truly exceptional. Exceptionally good or exceptionally bad."
• nicoburns 8y ago
  > I guess cinema as an art form is truly dead. I think cinema as an artform is thriving, just outside of the mainstream Hollywood, etc studios.
  • mipmap04 8y ago
    I agree. Fox is a factory that happens to make movies. A corollary here would be to say that "fashion as an art form is truly dead" because Wal-Mart sells mass produced graphic tees for children.
• jdietrich 8y ago
  Most movie-goers are primarily goers and only secondarily viewers. They decide to go to the movies, then they decide what they want to watch. Major blockbusters change the equation and draw in non-habitual consumers (hence their importance to Hollywood), but most movie productions aspire to little more than an appealing trailer, a bit of star power and sufficient entertainment value to avoid alienating their core customers. Retaining those customers is much easier than persuading someone like you to make a special trip to the theater for a critically acclaimed movie. The rise of Netflix and the decline of Blockbuster has decimated the secondary market for movies, further pushing the industry towards conservatism. It's much harder to convince people to pay to see a quirky indie picture or a sleeper hit at home, so movies that don't do well in the opening weekend are pretty much a dead loss. As with Spotify and the music industry, $12/mo subscriptions can't make up for the loss of $9 cinema tickets, $4 rentals and $15 DVD sales. Cinema isn't in a healthy place right now, much to the benefit of television - the economics for broadcast and streaming TV are much more favourable and there's an influx of talent.
  • eropple 8y ago
    > Most movie-goers are primarily goers and only secondarily viewers. They decide to go to the movies, then they decide what they want to watch. Any cites for this? I am very curious to read more about this.
    • 0xADEADBEE 8y ago
      Me too - it's a really insightful statement. I'd never thought about it before, but in social settings, the actual film watched is frequently an afterthought; it is secondary to the plan of 'going to the cinema'. Plans changing because someone is late is another factor. I really enjoy when this website makes me think of something obvious I'd never considered!
      • eropple 8y ago
        I was thinking about it from the other way around: because I'm not sure I know anybody who would go to the theater without really wanting to see the film being shown.
• Stunting 8y ago
  You might be falling for the branding friend! Studios have had a major vested interest in proclaiming their product is “Glamorous,” and “Unachievable in lessee glory.” Which in turn justifies the high budgets and higher ticket fares. But they are a pipeline, that pump 10-300 million dollars into a project that they won’t see a return on for 3 years at the shortest; starting from the time you pay a scriptwriter following through the Opening weekend. It’s in their best interest to tell people it is Once in a lifetime experience and then put out something that is going to me market accepted. On the occasional times, it is TRULY once in a life time (Mad Max: Fury Road for me), it hits us in the soul, and draws us back in. Worth it, to me.
• tombert 8y ago
  I cannot remember who said this, but I mostly agree with the sentiment of "there are no good or bad movies, only boring or interesting movies". I watch a ton of low-budget crap-films, because I find them funny, and I watch a lot of movies that are really interesting (either directly or intellectually). A movie that is boring is the worst kind of movie to me. A boring movie is something that I genuinely felt wasted my time. I got nothing out of it, and I couldn't even get a lot of enjoyment out of making fun of it. The perfect example of a movie in this category is the 2009 movie "9" (sorry if that's your favorite movie).
  • taneq 8y ago
    > "there are no good or bad movies, only boring or interesting movies" I appreciate the sentiment but in this case, wouldn't that make boring movies bad and interesting movies good? (Assuming, of course, you don't want to be bored...)
    • dragonsngoblins 8y ago
      Not really. Jurassic Park is a good movie, the framing, editing, script, fx work, performances, music all come together really well. Birdemic is a bad movie, in that none of the individual components are good and they don't complement each other well at all. I'd argue that both are interesting
      • taneq 8y ago
        So there are good and bad movies, and orthogonally, boring and interesting movies. :)
        • tombert 8y ago
          Yeah, maybe I should clarify; there are "good" and "bad" movies from a theoretical level. My enjoyment largely rests on how interesting I find them. Objectively terrible movies like "The Happening" or "The Room" or "Samurai Cop" or "Troll 2" or "Angry Red Planet" are "bad" because whomever made them seems to have no understanding of film-theory, or what it would take to make a "good" movie, but I find them endlessly entertaining...like watching a trainwreck The irony of it is that if they had tried to make those moves "bad" on purpose, they wouldn't be interesting at all (at least not to me), and they would just be "bad" on every level for me. In fact, even when there is sincerity, it's not a truly deterministic system. I think that the first Troll movie is technically objectively worse than Troll 2, but I find Troll 1 to be pretty boring, in addition to being incompetent, while Troll 2 is silly and an utter blast to watch.
• yesenadam 8y ago
  >I guess cinema as an art form is truly dead. You say this because of something 20th C Fox is doing?! May I suggest not watching any movies from the US for a year or 2, at least. There's a whole world out there. e.g. France, Spain, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Korea, Brazil, Iran, India, Denmark, Norway, Mexico... (A page on my website listing outstanding movies/series I've seen recently from each of those countries and others, I don't know a better place to point you to jump straight in: http://www.adamponting.com/movies/ http://www.adamponting.com/movies/ )
  • m3at 8y ago
    It's... An amazing list, thanks for sharing. Can I ask two things: - Where do you get your movies? - Do you watch a new one daily to have seen so many?
    • yesenadam 8y ago
      So glad someone got something from it! Hehe yeah, does look like a lot. But 2012-now is..~2800 days, probably there's less than 1000 movies/episodes on there, I haven't counted. Recently watching a lot of series...I like the longer form. I moved into a house in 2012 where they introduced me to torrents - before then I'd hardly seen any great movies, so that was really amazing watching all the great movies and directors I'd always heard of but never checked out. (Had only downloaded books and music before that I guess!) Used to often watch 2 or 3 movies on weekend days. Lately a couple of episodes of a series (or more if bingeing) each night, or a movie. I did put a lot of hours into researching, reading reviews, finding good things to watch, so that we didn't see many that weren't good. Finding obscure movies online is sometimes tricky (i.e. can take hours), also tracking down good subtitles can be hard, and often have to resync/shift them and/or fix them up. Being able to adjust audio and subtitles while watching with VLC is a must. I get them from: 1. torrents. Usually only works for popular/recent/famous stuff. Sno's torrents with hardcoded English subs are great, have watched a lot of those - mostly series, some movies. 2. movie and/or series sites like primewire, the now-defunct alluc, (which was amazing, finding obscure tv series episodes is much harder now), zocine.com, megashare.bz, www1.swatchseries.to that have links to online files. These come and go over the years. Adding "watch online" to google searches finds sites that the links to movie files can extracted from, either manually from the HTML or using TubeOffline-type downloader sites. 3. video sites. Google the movie/series name - often movies/episodes are on youtube/vimeo/dailymotion, especially when I forget to look for them there! Archive.org has a lot of stuff. (e.g. recently watched White Zombie (1932), the first zombie movie, and The Best Years of our Lives from there) Not uncommonly an obscure movie will seemingly only be online in one hard-to-find place. (e.g. The only place I could find one classic Australian movie was on someone's page on vk, russian facebook!) I have a startpage with searches each of those sites one click away, so I only have to type the name (& mostly year) once. Whenever I get something from a site I add the site to my start page to easily search it in future. Also my computer is a Mac from 2005 which doesn't make it any easier! Good luck.
• some-guy 8y ago
  I have the same taste in movies as you (awful B-grade or cinematic masterpiece, nothing in between), but I have the exact opposite conclusion regarding movies as an art form being "dead". Just like with music, the technical barriers to entry to make a film or a song are much lower than before, and the market is very saturated as a result. The issue is no longer "is there enough content that I would enjoy" but rather "how the heck to do I make a choice what to watch?".
• tomc1985 8y ago
  Once people realize the stupidity of hoarding and analyzing all the data that we do, I think they'll back off a bit. Too often these processes yield suboptimal results. We're in a dark age now because data science is currently quite sexy, and intuition decidedly not
  • dmix 8y ago
    Still, we’ve got to go through the medieval era to get to the enlightenment and modern era. Hopefully these big companies wasting millions on this mostly mediocre returns will find some gold for the future. Eventually it will be very useful in a more general sense, but it’s going to take time to get there. All we can hope for now are mainly niche wins for an ever expanding set of problems. Who knows if big budget films will be one. I’m not yet convinced by this article but at least they are trying and have the R&D budgets to fail a few times.medieval