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’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.
I also heard math students won’t solve all the maths. What gives??
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?
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”.
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
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.
Why pick a major you hate??
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.
If only we’ve shown kids Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies a bit more…
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.
Well they should fail then I guess.
Were they trying to watch Melania? From what I hear that would be understandable.
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.
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.
All that means is the better, more deserving ones who put the work in will be successful.
Oh, how adorably naive.
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.
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!! 😀 👍
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”
I watched it like thrice and it only got better and more fascinating on every rewatch.
And not exactly 4 hours of easy watching.
That may be true but the example in the article, Jules et Jim, is under 2 hours long.
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.
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.
Understood. You have no identity within reality, and thus everything is suspect to be artificial. Which is the state of Being within reality: non-belief (not merely as reality, but as a potentiality of reality).
One is drawn into a conclusion which is based upon the presupposition of non-reality. Which leads them deeper into their own suspicions, i.e, things and even critiques are not real, which means ‘I am Correct’, perpetually.
It seems complicated. Such a interesting state of being. Continue…
