I will always blame the teacher when the students aren’t engaged.
HOWEVER. I managed to block shorts form content, yt-vanced on mobile, and some browser extensions on my laptop, and uninstalled yt entirely from my tv until I get the time to install vanced there as well.
noticed a sharp improvement in my mental health, no less mindless scrolling for hours, and my attention span improved. even if my attention span remained the same, I’m happy about the change.
that being said, there were some good short content creators I liked and are allowed in my subscriptions. just that 99.99% of all short form videos are utter garbage.
are the movies shit? do you take into account that every movie stands on the shoulder of all the films before it and so rehashes the same shit usually the same way? can you appreciate that the good filmmakers raise the bar on what is acceptable and that a lot of the slop coming out can’t pass it?
I’ve given up on giving a chance to substandard crap. oh it picks up in the 2nd halp or third season or whatever - get fucked. how can pluribus grab me in the first five minutes? how can hell or high water do the same?
I believe its not so much about the quality of the movie. Shitty stuff often manages to catch our attentions. The kind of media we consume shapes the hooks that get our attention. If my habits are different from yours, what hooks my attention might not hook yours, and vice versa.
I’ve always considered myself a film buff but even i’m struggling to sit through most of the tripe that’s coming out of hollywood these days. Arts films have always been a challenge but rewarding once their completed.
everything is being done by committee now, and a lot of art films aren’t made for the art anymore, the are made to be award bait. same with a lot of indie stuff too. hence why so many of the oscar nominees pander to identity political correctness.
i mean some of the movies film professors pick, i had trouble sitting through, uh, 20-30 years ago (that is not an estimate i was one of those students) so is this on the professors? what are the films?
Theres something about homework that can make anything insufferable.
yeah. the university i did my undergrad at, they had their “international cinema” where they aired all the “boring” films their hoity toity professors wanted their students to watch. it was the best free date night all week after i dropped that major. damn good films, but when i had to watch them? please no.
it’s precisely why i am a home cook and not a professional chef. once you turn something to work, you can burn the love out of it. i never want to stop loving food.
Lyrical Nitrate
Oppenheimer was rough. The whole fuckin thing about whether he was a commie or not, or just how commie he was, is it commie to not want to drop the bomb, etc. Myopic, tedious. You could cut an hour out and it would be the same movie. They didn’t even get into the “Demon Core”.
Oppenheimer is one of the few movies where I seriously considered just leaving before it even ended because I was so bored. And I wish I did because by the end of it I was pissed that I spent that much time watching it.
I must have looked at my watch about 20 times wondering when it was going to end.
I feel like most of the recent Christopher Nolan movies have been extremely disappointing. His movies now basically consist of 2-3hrs of tension building that lead to nothing.
(And that trinity test was pathetic.)
I think he’s a great director, I’ve enjoyed all of his movies except Oppenheimer and Tenet.
That’s why i said recent. Tenet and Oppenheimer are both his most recent movies. The last Nolan movie I really enjoyed was Interstellar.
I’m surprised that’s what your experience of it was. To me it was about his hopeless (arguably naive) struggle to do what he thought was right and true in a time where both truth and morality were mostly becoming weaponized in service of alignments of power. He thought he could thread the needle only to time and time again have simply been used by others to further their own agendas, leaving hurt bystanders in his wake.
I somewhat agree that an hour could be cut out, though I don’t exactly know which parts.
I knew Hollywood would ruin it and I actively avoided seeing it.
Now that I know how it was ruined I don’t need to watch. Maybe in 10 years I’ll ask AI to do a “trololol’s cut” for me and I’ll watch it.
Cinema Sins will probably cover it in a year or two and that usually covers enough of a movie to get the gist of it. /S
I missed the /s , what’s cinema sins?
I also heard math students won’t solve all the maths. What gives??
There’s a difference between a movie you want to go see in a theater and the film assigned as classwork by a professor.
Same as if you were told you had to read a book by an author you don’t care for in a writing style that doesn’t click with you snd maybe even from a different time with framing that doesn’t exist today.
It’s work.
Maybe desire to play with a phone and use social media might be an issue, but at least some of these same kids that have a hard time sitting through a film would have doodled, started falling asleep or just daydreamed instead.
most of the comments in this thread are the same as the students in the article. they just want to be pandered to.
and think think anything that doesn’t pander to them is stupid and worthless and they see no point in it existing.
people failing to understand the universe doesn’t’ revolve around them and their opinions. almost as if there are other people out there with different opinions and some of those people have far more informed opinions than their own.
Why pick a major you hate??
people hate doing work.
I don’t think the kids hate it, just that the attention span isn’t what it used to be.
But it also works for us imo, to a degree. I at least find the pacing of 80’s or 90’s tv much calmer. And I daresay a movie from the B&W era would be slower still.
And I don’t think there’s yet a professional short-form making masterclass so that’s where the kids end up
Ever watch 2001: A Space Odyssey? I love it, but man it’s slow.
Also it’s a movie that asks more questions than it answers, which annoys a lot of people.
I saw Terminator 3 in the theater. The first 20-30:minutes, with that crazy chase, I was like, is this going to be the whole film? Eventually it does show down and take a breath, but I still remember my initial reaction to that.
a lot of people are idiots if they are looking for ‘answers’ in entertainment products.
i don’t expect my car to tell me the purpose of life. i expect it to get me places.
and the purpose of film class is to teach you how films work as a medium and learn to analyze them as such. not to entertain you.
I don’t think you understood what I meant. Most movies wrap up all the plotlines at the end. 2001 just leaves the viewer wondering what happens next. You see the star child, then the movie just ends. There’s also no explanation about the people that built the monoliths and transformed Bowman.
If only we’ve shown kids Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies a bit more…
I don’t see how that’s relevant.
i am still awestruck by that short of that girl who tosses her phone up in the air and it spins around a few times and gets the amazing slomo spinny shot of the beach and then boobs. I’m gonna be honest, i used to do camera work and i still can’t figure out how she thought it up (not the boobs part, everyone can think up boobs) she is a genius. she could cut out the boobs part it is such an amazing shot.
thumbnail of The Brutalist (4 hrs long) okay perhaps not the best example
Right? They should be making them watch the entire Lord of the Rings extended trilogy instead.
I’m not a film student but I assume that long, comparatively difficult films by Tarkovsky, Ozu, etc are a lot of what the film students are watching and I would imagine that the professors are commentating on more recent developments
Tarkovsky films are incredible but are a “watch once in your lifetime” sort of deal.
I asked my grandmother if she had seen STALKER and she said yes, when it came out in theaters, like 40 years ago (in the USSR), and I asked if she was interested in re-watching it with her grandkids
She said: “No. It’s a very difficult film. A very difficult film. You watch it only once because you don’t get the same feeling a second time”
that’s weird. i’ve watched many of them multiple times.
I watched it like thrice and it only got better and more fascinating on every rewatch.
And not exactly 4 hours of easy watching.
It’s not for the Marvel crowd but it’s an amazing movie wIth world class cinematography and it sucks you in.
It didn’t seem like 4 hours at all to me.
That may be true but the example in the article, Jules et Jim, is under 2 hours long.
Well they should fail then I guess.
Love that people complain about the length of movies while simultaneously happily siting through eight, hour+ long episodes of Stranger Things over two evenings.
Especially when many hours could have easily been left on the cutting room floor of most streaming shows, but they need to streeetch the runtime so that the writers can meet their contractual, or whatever other internal requirements.
Love that people complain about the length of movies while simultaneously happily siting through eight, hour+ long episodes of Stranger Things over two evenings.
Because a movie is a constant continuation, where as each episode has a hard end and you can stop and decide if you want to continue or stop.
Except that if you look at the stats, most Netflix viewers binge watch (88% here), and most engage in long binges (70% here reported 5 episodes or more at a time), binge watching is by all accounts ‘the norm’ for streaming service users.
So while you may be able to ‘decide if you want to continue or stop’ the statistics show that the vast majority of people end up watching much, much longer than a movie runtime - which was my point.
People tend to be more willing to do a lot of something if it’s broken up into smaller parts.
As an example, my great-grandmother used to always cut desserts and appetizers into smaller sizes if she noticed they weren’t being eaten. No one would take a large slice of cake but lots of people would take a small slice and then another small slice after. My grandmother took that advice from her and so did my mom, and it really does work very well. Same applies to movies and tv shows.
Though there is nothing stopping anyone from pausing a movie partway through and returning to it later.
Even though I said that, I am more reluctant to start watching a movie because of that time commitment, but I have done that when I did start some movies but wasn’t really feeling like I could stay interested in the moment.
I know a lot of people who hate watching just part of a movie. I’m one of those people too, though I also don’t really like tv shows normally. I’d rather a standalone film over one in a series as well. If I’m going to watch something, I want it to start and end in the same sitting, and ideally be 90-120 minutes, though there are exceptions of course.
Yeah that’s a good point. It’s a psychological hurdle.
Doesn’t mean people are attentive throughout though. I think it were Netflix execs that are currently pushing writers to constantly reiterate plot points because people aren’t paying attention.
I read the same, and I feel like that is a negative feedback loop.
Like the more the content is written so that people don’t have to pay attention and plot and scenery is verbally stated by actors, the less people will feel like they need to pay attention… and then they’ll turn to their phone.
Its gonna come back to bite them when they dumb the content down and people realize they don’t actually need to pay for Netflix to run in the background, and can instead just have YouTube videos of people reciting the plot to them while they doodle on their phones.
My favorite is when they they say something like “it starts getting good in season 3”. Like I’m going to watch tens of hours of a show that kind of sucks just to see if it actually starts getting good or not?
Of course, the reality is that they aren’t really watching the show like I would - as in, they aren’t sitting down and giving it their undivided attention. The show is on, but they’re also on their phones the entire time, or it’s on in the background and they are doing something else, or whatever. Probably one of the reasons why the show feels like it’s full of filler - they need to make sure that someone that’s only sort of paying attention can still follow what’s going on.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually true.
Doesn’t surprise me at all, really. Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy too, because if you make a show like that, then someone who sits down and actually tries to watch it is more likely to start getting bored and starts to get out that second screen.
The other issue, particularly with movies, is a lot of this stuff is created with the idea of making it easier to translate to other languages, hence things like the overly simplified dialog.
I read the other day that Netflix goes out of their way to restate the premises vocally and frequently as possible, and has as much plot duplication as possible so that people can still enjoy it while they’re watching their phones.
Not to completely invalidate your point but streaming shows are pretty formulaic in terms of pacing, with convenient break intervals, and are seldom very deep. Films are harder to break up around a bathroom trip or decide to put on hold until another day.
Not to completely invalidate your point but have you ever noticed the [pause] button when you’re watching a movie?
The exception is for cinema films, and any cinema film over two hours long (which is very rare) will generally have an intermission. Not that we were limiting the discussion to cinema entertainment anyway.
That’s like saying math students are having trouble sitting through a calculus class. All that means is the better, more deserving ones who put the work in will be successful. A tale as old as time.
Or it means that the education system is tailored for one specific learning style and that those with different styles or a neurodivergency are shit out of luck.
Or the more likely, it’s a bunch of new students who’ve grown up watching everything in portrait mode and short bursts with Subway Runner or someone cutting soap for some reason on half the screen.
I’m absolutely not an expert and not qualified here. But if we accept that you’re 100% right and need way more broad options, is it even possible to solve this at scale? (I’m assuming we’re all talking about the US since our education is atrocious). 350M Americans spread out across 3.5M sq miles - only smaller in landmass than China, Canada, and Russia, but with substantially LESS uninhabitable land and a relatively large population. That means our population density is nearly ¼ of China’s.
How many different learning styles do we support? Do they each get their own tailored schools, each with their own full staff? How do you equally support the 1/5 of the country (60M+) that live in all those spread out rural communities? And what time scale can we even fix this problem on, understanding that we’re in the midst of a teacher shortage as it is?
I think proper spending on education absolutely is part of this equation, but someone will have to gut our military spending, so that’s hurdle number one. But regardless, tax dollars being a limited resource… I wonder how much spending doing this right would cost. For a full educational overhaul.
you can’t accommodate everyone. one of the biggest problems with our current education system is exactly that we are doing this and it’s gutting education.
people are going to fail. they need to fail. that is how they learn. some people are smarter, faster, stronger than others, and we need to celebrate that fact rather than pretend it’s an evil to be eliminated.
education is systematically failing because we are trying to squeeze blood from stone. and the expectations on all sides are completely out of whack. but nobody wnats to ‘go back’ to the stuff that worked because it’s considered ‘oppressive’. which was pens, paper, and respect for educators. technology has overwhelmingly been a disaster for education.
We should only support neurodivergent learning styles. The neurotypical kids can just conform or end up in prison; they’re not worth the tax dollars to accommodate, sorry. It’s simply not cost effective, we’ll have to leave them behind.
Or we can just prescribe them drugs to make them conformant.
Not really.
I’ve seen similar complaints about reading assignments for college students as well. The stamina to focus on one piece of work for an extended period of time isn’t there compared to a generation ago.
You might have had some students not be able to focus before. Now it is almost the entire class.
can’t run a marathon if you can’t run a mile.
our kids can’t run a mile and can’t read a minute. and we blame everyone but ourselves for this.
All that means is the better, more deserving ones who put the work in will be successful.
Oh, how adorably naive.
Were they trying to watch Melania? From what I hear that would be understandable.
I watched both “Dune” from Denis Villeneuve yesterday, back to back, thats gotta be 4h straight. Went to pee once
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 CONGRATULATIONS ON WATCHING SO MUCH TELEVISION!!!!
(seriously, is that what you wanted?)
Thanks!! 😀 👍
You want to re-calibrate from the constant barrage of content? Find a way to watch The Wrath of God its a good movie that opens with a series of 30 second set shots of water flowing. Its like anti-transformers level of stillness
