Can’t believe how prescient this movie was. We’re on our way!
Go away! Bait’n!
XD
Ow my balls would be a step up.
Wassat?
I think Netflix manufactured this problem first. Originally they were going for volume so they added a lot of padding to their og shows. To the point I stopped watching (torrenting) any Netflix originals. So people got in the habit of doing other stuff while waiting for the plot to start moving again. Now they claim that their shows are meant for second screens. Motherfucker: we are in the golden age of TV, so there’s plenty of engaging content being produced. Marvelous Mrs. Maisle is so fast paced and brilliant I never felt the need to pick up my phone.
Marvelous was great. Always attentive to that show.
I wasn’t looking at my phone when I watched that cop movie they made. I was lifting weights and hemming my sweatpants.
I’ve seen quite a lot recently saying a particularly distracting aspect of phones isn’t that they’re a screen and a visual stimulus, but a tool and a haptic stimulus.
An increasingly popular way to combat checking your phone while watching TV is to busy your hands with something. If this works and is widely adopted, we won’t need shows to have second-screen writing repetition; our brains tell our hands to use the tool, and it just so happens that the tool is full of text and speech and occupies the language center of our brains, meaning we stop listening to the show.
Also, a whole separate thing I often think about, before 2010, there were very few high budget TV shows. TV was made on a much smaller budget than film, and the writing often took a hit too, and that was just the reality of watching TV. They were also designed to hook people who were clicking around channels with lots of recaps and narrative refreshers, for people tuning in halfway through, this is like the second-screen writing issues we complain about now on steroids, straight to TV movies were also terrible for this.
Movies that were designed for Cinema revenue weren’t impacted by this or course, but even DVD revenue movies often have simpler plots and reiterate their narratives for people who are half watching while chatting or stoned or whatever.
Or we are on our phones because the movies repeat their themes over and over and over again
i dunno, most people i see watch netflix seem to use it as just another mode of stimulus because they need to always be completely inundated with flashing screens at all times to feel calm
I feel like it’s both, but it also comes down to if I care enough to skip through the rehash.
Writer insight : if people start pulling their phone when they should be watching your movie, it means your movie is shit, not that it should be made even sloppier. Watered down shit is still a shit cocktail.
Netflix movies are pretty crap for doing these because we ourselves are to blame. I admit I have done this couple of times while watching movie or TV at home.
This is what kills any articles on the web. The first three paragraphs repeat the question you’re looking to get answered and the last paragraph vaguely answers it.
I feel like an old person now but I’ve started watching movies from the 90s/2000s and I can’t believe how much worse movies have become over the years.
SEO was a mistake.
SEO was inevitable. That what is optimal to be seen in a search is not what is most useful for the end user is a failure of search engine algorithms to properly penalize that shit.
Also the more repetition the more room on the page for ad spots. Same reason so many Youtubers restate the same shit almost verbatim over and over and over; it pads the video so Youtube can cram in more ad spots.
There are some standout exceptions to that trend but it is a depressing trajectory for sure
Bad movies need to do this. You know, the average movie Netflix signs off on.
Make movies that are engaging enough to keep people from checking their feeds while they wait for something to happen.
I dunno man, I can’t get my friends to watch some stellar movies because their attention span has been shot over time.
Believe it or not, they’ll watch crappier movies because they don’t need to pay attention.
Can’t right now, ow my balls is on.
That doesn’t sound very streamlined or profitable to me.
My wife said that the Wire was hard to follow and boring, but she also checked her phone every 5 minutes and was carrying on a conversation there with her friends. She also impulsively pulled out facebook and scrolled a bit. I pointed all this out but Its still the shows fault somehow.
Part of it is the movie, but a large part is that short form video trains your brain to need frequent dopamine fixes. A 5 second video does that, while a 90 minute movie might not give it until the climax.
It’s not much different than a smoker taking a break during a movie.
If someone starts a movie and immediately pulls their phone out or starts cleaning, that’s on them.
And movies absolutely should not be made to cater to addiction. Nothing should, except for something explicitly designed to help people recover from addiction.
When movies have a good idea and are given the proper attention to make them well, regular people won’t be checking the time or reading blogs when they become bored. The problem is that studios say that, good idea or not, proper attention to the craft or not, we’re making this many movies this year. We’re lucky if a few of those movies are something future generations would consider good.
Matt Damon is suggesting that movies be made even worse than they already are.
Matt Damon is suggesting
It definitely reads more as “Netflix execs suggest and Matt Damon complains about”
I can’t stand short videos. I won’t even watch videos that aren’t an hour or longer myself. I don’t get these shorts, it’s so unsatisfying.
We get our short attention span jones from reading headlines and comments.
That’s the problem they don’t want to discuss. Writing has gotten seriously shitty.
If you watch shitty movies, yes. There are still plenty of good movies being made.
I’ve watched through ‘Severance’, which is very popular afaict. It’s chock full of protracted shots padding the runtime. Either the directors (mostly Ben Stiller) think they’re new Kubricks, or the directive was to make the show longer. Idk what Netflix gets from a longer show, when a season is dumped all at once anyway — presumably more space for ads, which are apparently there now. I wouldn’t feel much guilty about checking the phone in between any meaningful action.
The only new film that really gripped me in the past few years was ‘The Substance’, which felt like oldschool Cronenberg stuff. Ironically it’s comparatively long, and doesn’t even have much dialogue.
First and foremost, you’re complaining about pacing, not writing. Second, that’s your opinion and that’s fine. Personally, I don’t think every single second needs to move the plot forward. I’m perfectly fine with sections of it being transicions or world building or other stuff.
Your opinion’s fine though. Just go watch something else. However, you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily bad, nor good.
If the substance really is the only film that gripped you in the past few years, then you either are terrible at picking movies or you just don’t really like cinema all that much.
It literally doesn’t work for most people anymore
Short form videos fried people’s attention and dopamine needs
Oh fucking please… that has nothing to do with it.
lol yea, toootally nothing to do with it. That’s why nobody ever talks about great movies, and movies toooootally aren’t getting longer nad longer… yep, totally not a quality to attention thing.
Not like there are legendary movies that are several hours long that people still watch… Yep, quality has nothing to do with how long people stay engaged with movies!
The fact that classics exist has literally nothing to do with this discussion. Also, no, movies aren’t getting longer. Source.
There are plenty of great films still being made every year. If you don’t watch or like them, that’s a you problem.
Nowhere did I say they no longer make good movies.
K bud
Reading comprehension hard. I’m sorry you struggle so much in life you’ve just internalized it. Very sad.
The Intro to the film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” comes to mind.
Great film, slow, steady, meaningful.
Do the people who have their phones out in films nowadays watch those old movies without looking at their phones, hmm?
Your snark makes you sound like an arsehole.
My snark is because it was an assinine statement that was said rudely. I don’t know why you’re mad at me and not the rude person with the wrong opinion.
Bud… people are on thier phones constantly… there nothing that will stop that…
It’s the big tech social media disease.
Everyone, frigging everyone who steps away from fb/insta/twittler/yt/tiktok/… says the same “holy shit my mind is so peaceful all of a sudden.” And somehow it’s not substantially part of the daily discourse. Somehow between that and EVERYTHING else these mfrs are responsible for (protecting pedos, encouraging insurrections, …) just flies.
It’s a disease, an addiction, a plague and we gotta start naming it as such. Talk to your loved ones and carefully try to get them off that shit.
I don’t use FB, Instagram, X, or TikTok, but on YT, the last few things I watched was a video by ElectroBoom on electric showerheads, some other video about how ancient Egypt made things so flat, a couple of episodes of the 50s TV show The Lone Ranger, and a video about the Eiffel Tower.
If you’re watching things on YT that’s making your mind unpeaceful, watch something else. Getting off of YT isn’t going to help. No matter where you or your loved ones go, there they are.
Does that include Lemmy?
You tell me:
-are you getting ads/shorts/brainrot shoved in face every single second?
-is the public on lemmy tolerant of sexoffenders? Nazis?
-ads? (Yes, I initially misspelled it as “adds” this guy right here)
-do you have superfluous bs following you around?
I think not.
-are you getting ads/shorts/brainrot shoved in face every single second?
No, but I don’t get that elsewhere either. You may need to update your adblocker. Or install more than one (one for web stuff and sponsorblock to get YTers doing their own ad reads).
I think we define the list differently.
There is a difference between let’s say ads and shorts (which are indeed blockable to a certain level). But then there’s the brainrot. Which to me envelopes a bigger problem.
On fb for example to me this was promotion of influencers, meme pages, … patronising stuff that annoys me endlessly.
I don’t think you can steer Facebook in a way that they don’t display certain content you don’t want. In fact I’ve has the opposite happen a few times.
“Oh you’re trying to tell the algo you want less of this content? How about some more, twice as much?”.
At that point I’m done with the platform, no thx. And just in general, I’m throwing away as much big tech accounts as I can and it feels like a relief, good riddance.
You forgot:
- Is an algorithm shoving political divisive rage bait down your throat?
But thanks for listing why I like it here
I think if no public bathrooms are available, then we should be allowed to urinate in public.
Regarding adds: I guess if you fight one lemmy user, others will spawn and come to help. So I would say yes, there are adds
So people having discourse equals advertising?
Nah, they’re making a joke from the misspelling.
add: To perform addition. Or a mob joining an ongoing fight in a game.
ad: An advertisement.
Thank you, should have made that clear.
Well looks like I’ll be having an omelette tomorrow morning on account of the egg on my face. 🤣
Lemmy/Piefed is an echo chamber, and has some structural issues like Reddit. But there’s no algo, no advertising, nor constant phone notifications.
And, uh, no billionaires warping “open” discourse.
To me, it’s a time black hole, worse than old forums. But it’s not nearly as bad as (say) Discord or anything Facebook owned.
nor constant phone notifications.
Until emails broke on our instance I used to get email notifications for replies, which would send a notification to my phone, which would get forwarded to my smart watch.
So, uh, yeah.
It can. Depends on how you use it. Wear gloves and goggles when handling .ml and such.
I find shows and movies that show something happen clearly and then restate it in the dialogue immediately quite annoying. Very common in anime.
Wait, you’re telling me that restating dialog makes you annoyed, especially because it happens so frequently in anime?
In anime, you should expect repetitive exposition. Can it be that Netflix has gained this power, too?
Netflix has gained the power of repetitive exposition? Such a feat has only been attained by anime before! One should expect it there, but now it’s really bothering OP!
Metal Gear???
!
To be fair, that can be necessary to make the action understandable, especially when you’re adapting a game that you don’t expect the viewers to be experts in. (Which is always because these shows are usually supposed to be advertisements.
Imagine an MtG-themed show where battles looked like this:
Player A: “Okay, your turn.”
Player B: “Untap, draw… In my precombat main I play Isochron Scepter with Pongify.”
Player A: “Fold.”
Spectator: “Yeah, that was obviously unwinnable.”
…without even bothering to explain the cards, much less why player A’s game couldn’t stand up to a questionable use of an Isochron Scepter.
(Of course a particularly egregious case was Yu-Gi-Oh, which needed these explanations because the card game as shown on the show made no sense.)
Nani?
I wonder if its due to how closely Anime attempts to animate Manga? I feel like you can kind of “explain” what happens in text alot more smoothly than on a TV show due to how much faster you ingest knowledge.
Often it’s a localization issue too. Japanese dialogue doesn’t translate easily to English, it’s usually longer and has more layers of formality that English can’t express. And they often aren’t allowed to cut the content, so they have to make the English super wordy and explainy to match the long winded mouth flaps.
Yeah I also didn’t think of the translation part too, good point
That’s a good point, I agree for anime it is probably stylistic like some comic book movies are comic-y.
Some YouTube channels do this and I started to hide them in the recommendations because it pisses me off so much.
The constant restating on Youtube is to pad out their video and get more ad spots. I also immediately dislike and hide them because of that.
Same here, I know why they do it, but they will lose me as a viewer.
Make content that makes people put their phones down.
This is part of the genius of kpop demon hunters. It moves fast, sometimes frenetically.
It’s not just me, right? Modern movies and shows have less things happen in same duration of time.
I would actually argue the opposite. Modern movie plots are an ADD fever dream. There are so many things going on that keeping track is an absolute chore.
I think you’re both right, somehow.
Less movement in the main plot, but more unnecessary side plot shit that is often unresolved by the end.
Except pluribus
Films maybe, but Netflix appears to pad shows’ runtime without shame.
No they are not. I cannot watch them unless i speed them up past what Netflix allows me. They are so slow and information sparse that i cannot watch them.
Depending on what shows you watched, plenty from the 90s/00s assumed viewers wouldnt make it for the airing once a week. So they did fluff a bunch and rely on “this week’s monster” rather than dense series plots. I remember despising dragon ball z (my brothers favorite) because multiple episodes would go by with fuckin NOTHING happening.
I was always mad that Goku would finally make it to Namek, then for some reason next week they would time jump backwards and he’d be back in the hyperbaric training chamber. It felt like DBZ groundhog month. If you are mad about missing the actual meat of the show like I was, I highly recommend “Dragon Ball Kai” - it’s DBZ with the filler removed!
You need to relax my dude
Modern shows are lazy, they are like 6, 10 episodes tops. The simpsons in the 90s before they sucked did almost 30. They would take summer off, then breaks on xmas and spring but a show a week otherwise.
Dude… That was annual, too. These modern day 8-episode shows will have YEARS between seasons. Like, motherfucker, half your scenes are green screen in a big sound studio – what the fuck is taking you so long?!
They have to wait for Ai tokens to replenish.
Is that why the last season of Stranger Things spent half the season rehashing how all the characters had felt about anything ever throughout the previous four seasons?
I think re-explaining things that happened in previous seasons is a different issue. They’re worried that you don’t remember what happened because it has been so long.
And that’s fair. I know I watched Season 2 (and it definitely had my full attention, because I’m incapable of doing two things at once), but the only thing I can actually remember about it is the episode where El went to Chicago and met some shadowrunners. And something about tunnels. Everything else is a blur.
The last season being a big mess aside, it was 100% guilty of re-explaining the plot, not just the recaps. Together with those unnecessary “LET ME EXPLAIN” scenes, like Robin using vinyls to explain a very basic concept. They really treated us like idiots.
I was complaining to my family about how El getting a bloody nose was originally used to indicate how she severely over exerted herself while using her powers. In this last season they turned it into the “I used magic and am trying to look cool” sign. I found it belittling.
The entirety of the show is like that. It’s not like a deep thinky clever show, it’s a series of 80’s horror movie references tossed in a blender.
Yes and no. This season has been pretty weak in the writing department, so some of these ideas that worked before were overused/used poorly this season. And for an 80s-throwback series, it ends rather depressingly, no matter how you spin it. But it’s par for the course these days for the final season/finale to shit the bed, I guess.
Depressingly? It was fully happily ever after. And it just did the same thing every other season did, largely disregard previous seasons to introduce a new big bad for the season leading up to a big monster fight. It was incredibly par for the course, 70 percent style with 30 percent substance. It’s not high cinema but it’s entertaining tv.
It was fully happily ever after.
Hard disagree. Fully happily-ever-after wouldn’t have ended with
S5 finale spoilers
the main 16-year-old character either dying or somewhere all on her own with no family/friends/support circle, useful life skills, money or even documents to travel anywhere outside the US. While her boyfriend is stuck with depression and potentially living in delusion that she is still alive. The whole idea that El represents childhood magic and that she has to die/disappear, so other characters could move on is genuinely out of touch and potentially harmful, considering she’s been “used, abused and manipulated” since she was born. Sends a real fucked up message there. This could have worked, if the show had finished in one season. But it does not work after 5 seasons of growth (though in S5 she was completely sidelined). The one character that deserved happily ever after, and they didn’t give it to her. Not to mention how Vickie has been completely forgotten in the epilogue, or rather discarded with an offhanded comment about being an “overbearing significant other”, when Robin has been an asshole to her the entire season.
I actually would have loved a true happily-ever-after. This tired trend of every show—even something that’s supposed to be lighthearted—getting a tragic or “bittersweer” ending, because that’s considered “deep”, should just die already.
I disagree with basically that whole interpretation. And the ending was explicitly hopeful. I think you just took it personal that what you thought was gonna happen didn’t.
I agree with what you’re saying (aside from comparing that really awful episode to Shadowrun), but that’s not what went on in Stranger Things. It was just…
From the very first episode, I asked if they had changed writers because the dialogue was so different, so bad, and so predictable–all of which only grew worse with each passing episode. And when each character had their turn to explain who they are and how they feel, it fit the same exact pattern every time. It was just really bad writing.
All that said, I don’t think the last season was terrible. I expected it to be a lot worse than it was. The actual plot and ending of the story, I thought were perfectly mediocre and fine. It was ruined by the dialogue.
All that said, I don’t think the last season was terrible. I expected it to be a lot worse than it was. The actual plot and ending of the story, I thought were perfectly mediocre and fine. It was ruined by the dialogue.
I agree with you, it was better than I expected (although I had extremely low expectations to be fair). The most miserable parts of the final season were the long “emotional” character moments with the most juvenile/amateur/unrealistic writing. I don’t skip as a rule, but I really felt like fast forwarding through some of that stuff, it was so cringe.
Pro tip: VLC has the option of running the video at a speed of choice, where 110% is good for pretty much everything. I wish I knew of this feature when I watched through ‘Harry Potters’ and the ‘Matrix’ trilogy.
That was definitely part of it, but I think they also wrote themselves into a corner in previous seasons by not properly laying the groundwork for any of the supernatural stuff. In Season 5, they had to constantly infodump the viewers in those “plan” scenes to keep up.
What, do you expect the audience to pay attention and infer how characters are feeling based on things like subtle body cues? What like acting?
Yup, and on the same boards with people whining about that are complaints from people that still missed shit.
Fucking train wreck of a season. It was garbage full of useless dialogue between every character. I couldn’t watch past the first few episodes.
I wouldn’t have my phone out to begin with Netflix if you didn’t start adding ads.
🏴☠️
You pay for ads? There’s like a Plex server every 5 houses in my neighborhood, and we are all poor as shit. Maybe that’s it though, find you some poor people and stop paying for Netflix
I guess that’s why ‘Severance’ is full of padding shots with nothing happening in them.
Most are even marked with ominous elevator music for your convenience.
