Comment by bccdee

Comment by bccdee 14 hours ago

> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span

No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.

Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.

Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," 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.

crazygringo 14 hours ago

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.

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bccdee 14 hours ago

A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to.
> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable
"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.

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- crazygringo 13 hours ago
  
  > Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
  That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.
  > "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
  Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed it up and improve your experience.
  There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
  
  bccdee 12 hours ago
  
  Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.
  It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.
  > That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
  Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?
  I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?
  
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