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Comment by llbbdd | Hacker News Reader

You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tension and mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?

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> 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'm OK with you re-editing the movie as you watch it, but you can't say you watched the same movie as other people that don't do that.

Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice.

Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.

Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.

That's perfectly true, but like Heraclitus' river, you can have a very similar experience on more than one occasion. (After the first time, at least.)

But what you are doing isn't the same river twice, it's saying "it works on my machine" but not saying you patched the binary.

Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.

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.

All I can suggest is that you watch some of Adam Curtis's work.

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...

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