4 ms·

I suspect film might just be dead as an artistic medium that can be enjoyed by lots of people. I maybe go to a movie theatre once every couple of years these da

I suspect film might just be dead as an artistic medium that can be enjoyed by lots of people. I maybe go to a movie theatre once every couple of years these days, the rest of the time I watch things at home. It’s a hard ask to set aside two contiguous hours (or more!) to watch a film when there are so many good series or video games that demand less contiguous attention. People will rant about attention spans I guess but it’s really a matter of what quality of entertainment you can fit in with the rest of your life. If I watch a film in the evening that is pretty much the only thing I do with that evening; not so with other entertainment formats. The two hour film is also like the equivalent of a short story: there’s the mental barrier to entry of loading new characters and settings and world rules into your head, and so I find it more difficult to read anthologies of short stories than a novel of the same length.

stnmtn 5y ago
Almost all my friends echo your sentiment that film is much harder to commit to than a TV show; and I can't disagree more. Watching a TV series means I'm committing to 8+ hours per season, across many days of my life. A film, even a 2 hour one, I watch in an evening and can enjoy taking it in in full, with all questions that it wants to answer itself being answered. A TV show will end with cliffhangers each episode just to make sure it demands your attention again tomorrow night. That's not to say TV=bad, movies=good; just that IME respect your time way more and are easier to commit to most nights.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Both of you should give this lecture to people in the third world. The act of sitting on a couch, watching something entertaining that thousands of people put work in to produce, is a "commitment". And in fact, the commitment is too much. Because for this same commitment, one could replace it with several smaller ones that entail the exact same thing, but with even less thinking. If only there were a device that would just directly inject the memory of a movie into our brains, saves us from all this "effort".

stnmtn 5y ago

Almost all my friends echo your sentiment that film is much harder to commit to than a TV show; and I can't disagree more. Watching a TV series means I'm committing to 8+ hours per season, across many days of my life. A film, even a 2 hour one, I watch in an evening and can enjoy taking it in in full, with all questions that it wants to answer itself being answered. A TV show will end with cliffhangers each episode just to make sure it demands your attention again tomorrow night. That's not to say TV=bad, movies=good; just that IME respect your time way more and are easier to commit to most nights.

fleddr 5y ago
Both of you should give this lecture to people in the third world. The act of sitting on a couch, watching something entertaining that thousands of people put work in to produce, is a "commitment". And in fact, the commitment is too much. Because for this same commitment, one could replace it with several smaller ones that entail the exact same thing, but with even less thinking. If only there were a device that would just directly inject the memory of a movie into our brains, saves us from all this "effort".