Hacker News Reader

Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

I'd add two more:

1. Kids get bored quicker, This year, I've left the cinema four times before the movie finished because the kids were bored. This makes me less likely to go back, they prefer to stay home on the xbox/lappy or go out for pizza/bowling instead.

2. Mass appeal movies are shit. There's just no quality or focus anymore, every movie is trying to be everything to everyone and ends up crap.

Don't get me started on the overuse of CG.

Instead of learning from filmmakers, the CG guys picked up tips from animators, that's why every CG creature walks and talks the same, with over emphasised, unrealistic, and ridiculous movement patterns that don't fool anyone and ruin the moment. You know why Jurassic Park is still awesome? and ghostbusters, and all those other heavy animation movies? Because they don't look obviously fake.

View on HN

Completely agree with "kids get bored". It's to the point we don't bother going. My kids literally groan if I mention going to a movie over the weekend.

Then there's going to a 3D movie. It might as well be a punishment. Making kids watch a movie with giant glasses that fall off their face and strain their eyes is just cruel. My son complains that his arms hurt by the end of the movie because he's tried keeping those glasses on the whole time. Then, of course, the movie had no right being 3D. Adding cut scenes of flying through a 3D town or a cat flying at the screen does not justify this awful experience.

I actually find it very difficult to watch Jurassic Park these days. The CG has not aged well at all. With Ghostbusters, the effects look terrible in a few scenes (the claymation dogs spring to mind), but it's not so jarring in the context of a comedy.

> The CG has not aged well at all.

Really? I look to Jurassic Park as what CG should look like in movies. The opening reveal of the brontosauruses is still amazing, especially when you think of when the movie was made. What hasn't aged well?

Other movies from the mid-to-late 90s, on the other hand, have not aged well. Many of these used CG for the sake of having CG and did not take any care of ensuring it integrated into the rest of the shot.

No one is disputing how awesome it looked when it first came out, but the same thing could be said for quake 1. As our eyes adjust to the ever increasing details in movies and games, what used to look awesome begins to look awful. Here is the scene with the Brontosaurs While it seemed photo-realistic when it first came out, it now looks choppy, grainy, and artificial. Most low-budget T.V. shows have better CG now. But that's just the way computer animation works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJlmYh27MHg

I appreciate the link, but I definitely disagree with you.

I have to agree with you. If any film needs a special edition, it's this, not Star Wars or E.T.

Honestly? I may even be up for a 3d conversion... If anyone's able to do them well?

I actually feel the exact opposite of this. I recently rewatched both and thought Jurassic Park held up amazingly well (at least the first one) and Ghostbusters looked far worse (as it should being that it's nearly 10 years older than Jurassic Park).

Kids these days?

Or is it that the kids couldn't get through the movie because it was actually boring to them? Isn't it possible that movie-makers are just out of touch with the demo?

Honest question here. I've left boring movies before, too, and it's been awhile since anyone called me a kid.

Better question. Can you remember the plot of the last 5 movies you went to see?

Yep, I believe the majority of films I have ever watched has this plot:

The protagonist is put into a situation where he is drawn from a position of security and is force to embark on a journey to resolve the situation.

The journey exposes the protagonist to a foreign environment and they must learn how to deal with the new situation. Often given tools to master their destiny.

After some time the new situation goes bad to due to the protagonist failing to understand the exact nature of the new environment, mistakes are made and the protagonist is put at some level of emotional or physical danger.

Some miraculous event occurs which breaks the protagonist out spiralling chaos.

Turns out people don't like stories that which fail to follow that pattern :)

In romantic comedies...

  - Lonely woman meets strange man,
  - Man drags woman around,
  - Woman is *mildly inconvenienced*, this is key, causes conflict,
  - Situation is somehow happily resolved.

Not sure about everyone else, but I am sick of movies where the likes of Jennifer Aniston spend too hours boggling at mild inconvenience.

Gahhh. No wonder I haven't set foot in a movie theater for years.

Its generalised quite well with this theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Go listen to track 6 of the new Patton Oswalt album...

Because? Also, you could actually name the track. Even better give a link for us to listen to it?

It might be awesome but you're not on reddit now; downzoat.

Um, because I thought posting the link to the pirated YouTube track would be a bit more tacky. But whatever.

There are plenty of ways to link to music, Amazon previews, bands website, official/certified vid on YouTube, etc., that don't involved copyright infringement.

Basically I'm still at a loss as to what you felt you were adding to the conversation?

This basically fits the idea of the hero's journey[0], an idea by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell believes that many myths follow this hero's journey through 3 phases: departure, initiation and return. It's startling how many myths fit this almost perfectly.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

"1. Kids get bored quicker"

A great point, but I would venture to say it is not just kids.

People who are now in their 20s and 30s, with money to spend on movies, grew up in the "MTV generation"; accused of having no attention span as a result of the format used by MTV. I count myself as one of them. Thirty minutes into a movie and I am ready for it to be over.

I'm not sure the majority of the population want to completely fixate themselves on a screen for hours at a time anymore. At least at home you can stop or shift your focus as you see fit.

I think you are on to something about the loss of focus. My kids seem to always need two screens going when they watch something at home. I'd fight it more, but I'm bad about it too.

As for the CG, the best effects are always in moderation. The more you can leave to the imagination, the better. I honestly think a big part of it is budget, too: ie, no money for hand-crafted animations true to the character... let's motion capture this thing and be done with it in two days. In the old days, the question was whether you spent the time to make a fully articulated puppet or you just put a guy in a gorilla suit. Most CG these days is the later, done digitally.

"1. Kids get bored quicker" I think that's related to multitasking, it's kinda sad kids today can't even do one thing at a time. The hole attention span issue.

Which movies were these? I find Rotten Tomatoes a decent indicator of quality and most mass marketed movies get very poor ratings. Even the "amazing" movies (90%+ critics and 80%+ of audience liked it) can have some slow parts you could consider "boring".

The number one reason is your second point (without the CG). The problem is that it's total crap. There's lack of content, bullshit scenarios, nothing entertaining. It's not the overuse of CG, but that it's the only thing they're selling anymore.

Here's the thing, everyone I speaks to agrees that modern movies are mostly crap. But...why, with their big focus group budgets and such, are the movie studios not listening to this? Or is their output really the best they are being pitched?

Well, two things:

"Everyone you speak to" is probably a group of people very similar to you. That's how most peoples' social groups work, and it's hard to notice because your experience of them tends to factor out the similarities and focus on the differences.

The value of a potential moviegoer is almost a binary function of movie quality: the looks good enough to be worth the price of a ticket, or it doesn't. The marginal value of added quality past that point is slight, at least from a box office perspective. So to maximize revenue, you want your movie to exceed that threshold for as many people as possible. This is why the highest-grossing movies in any given year tend to be family-friendly comedies.

WRT marginal quality, I don't think that word of mouth buzz from great quality can be ignored - one of the ways to build a massive (and massively profitable) franchise like the Dark Knight/The Matrix/Toy Story is by making a really, really good movie.

Gah, stupid phone... sorry about this.

It's getting a lot harder to "con" people into making a movie a blockbuster via advertising.

The movie industry is being ran by idiots, that's why. They are ready to kill the internet and free speech because they think this will save them a buck.

Anyway, french movies seem more interesting lately. And you can always vote for (with your money) alternative forms of art.

Because the most money is made from appealing to the lowest common denominator. There are plenty of awesome T.V. shows, but whenever American Idol and the Real Housewives are on, people ignore them.

For every person who loved the original "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," there are 1000 who just want to see Michael Bay spend $300 million on 120 minutes' worth of animated explosions for a 4th, 5th, and 6th time.

The CG in the Planet of the Apes movie was really well done though.

>Kids get bored quicker

I bet you walked to school uphill, in both directions, in 3ft of snow in 110 degree heat!

Kids never change. You have.

When I was a kid, I could sit and watch movies or TV for hours. Even crappy ones. Now, of course, it has to actually be good.

Kids have always had shorter attention spans than adults, though. That's why children's movies are usually just over an hour while adult movies can be 2-3 hours.

I agree. I only posted to comment on the idea that somehow kids these days have gotten worse compared to older generations. The original post mis-attributes the kids getting bored to shorter attention spans, rather than lower quality films.

Take for example

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937): 84 minutes
  Bambi (1942) runtime: 70 minutes
  Toy Story 3 (2010): 103 minutes

The "kids these days" myth has existed since the dawn of language. People grow up and do not understand they have changed, not the children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_theatrical_featu...

http://www.disneymovieslist.com/disney-movies.asp

I was actually agreeing with that--when I was a kid, I could actually sit through a kid's movie. If kids today empirically can't do that, then maybe they have changed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com