Comment by crazygringo

> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it

To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.

> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?

Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.

But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.

I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.

Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.

I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a director's vision for a movie you can bring your own perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie. It's no different to picking out a specific track in an album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific track and playing it on repeat.

One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes because I don't care about the characters. Some of the animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them in-depth though.

Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate various components of a work without caring for the combined result.

One of the things which helped break me out of the normative movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.

In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the director's vision of a work, and you were forced to experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we want. Game modding is another variation on this same principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I should be able to patch it and play it however I want.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/every-spongebob-frame-i...

No, that's incorrect.

A short attention span is when you can't pay attention to things for a long time, even if you want to.

If you can pay attention to things for a long time when you want to, then you don't have a short attention span.

If you'd rather skip over the parts that don't interest you, that's just called using your time efficiently.

Your analysis is extremely simplistic.

> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.

Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.

> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either

You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".

> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.

Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838651

That's why I'm "pro-boredom," in a sense. If you let yourself dismiss a scene when you're not enjoying it, you may never discover what's enjoyable about it. Putting in the work of paying attention pays dividends. Of course, sometimes it yields nothing, but that's why you need to get good at it. If paying attention to something boring feels like pulling teeth, you'll never do it, and you'll miss a lot of great stuff.

And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.

Sure, technically speaking.

And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested.

But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life better.

I try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible.

People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations.

There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.

"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern"

Introduction of character.

Dialogue.

Gratuitous sex scene.

Machiavellian discussion.

Reference to earlier episode.

Cliffhanger.

> Pluribus

The episodes vary from 43 to 63 minutes because that's what the director thought worked best. The season is 9 episodes long.

I extremely doubt anything in there is filler.

> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler

When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."

Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.

> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport

That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own style, etc.

Here's the thing: the overall movie isn't good, but it might contain some really good elements. The point of skimming and controlling your media experience is to appreciate the good parts while discarding the bad.

It's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and being served a nice steak with a side of shit. You can just eat the stake and ignore the shit. The dish would be better if they replaced the shit with something good like mashed potatoes, but you can still enjoy the steak. This is how the contrarians read to me: "Noooo, but the shit side dish is an essential component to the culinary experience that the chef's team prepared, it's their vision."

The first time someone encounters 2001, they will almost certainly come away with some WTF? vibes, at least if they're being honest with themselves.

For my first time, I made the mistake of renting a VHS and watching it on a 19" TV. Heard this was a good SF movie, guess I'll check it off my list. Yeah, no. What I saw later in a 70mm cinema was the same content, same story, same words and images, but a very different movie. The setting and presentation made all the difference between a seemingly-pointless waste of time and a profound life experience.

That said, what we saw isn't what Kubrick filmed. Bowman's exercise sequence was originally a full 10 minutes long, just pacing around in circles, and a few other sequences including the Dawn of Man prologue were also much longer. Audiences in 1968 weren't buying it. Kubrick had to tighten things up, because complaining about the audience's attention span wasn't the option back then that it apparently is now.

More like "I love pizza. But I don't eat the crust around the edge. Because that leaves me more room to eat more of the main part which I love more."

The word you are looking for, if you are looking for one, is declinism.