Rose Horowitch wrote this piece for The Atlantic about film students who have little to no patience with movies. It's a great article, dispiriting though it might be, but it unzipped my own feelings about how people [don't] watch movies.
I don't think we have a crisis of media illiteracy because that implies people are incapable of understanding things. They're definitely capable, it's moreso intellectual laziness and severe attention deficits. I just think people need to slow down. It reminds me of when Roger Ebert got annoyed by his contemporaries for missing out on the significance of the Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo that he called them out on At The Movies. Hell, going even further back: Orson Welles' frightening cockatoo squawk in Citizen Kane was put there to make sure audiences weren't nodding off. He made no illusions about why it's there, either, he just knew people would be lazy. So this isn't entirely a new issue but it's gotten worse.
One reason: I fucking hate the RunPee app. It's designed to tell people when's the best time to go to the bathroom during a movie. Now, am I saying there's no movie with skippable moments? No, obviously. But this app implies that every movie has a moment (or moments) worth skipping, which is horseshit. And the reasons given are usually dialog-heavy beats, character moments, or montages. Before I disappear down a "Plot isn't God, character moments are more important" rabbit-hole that throws me off course, I'll just say: Every single second of a movie is meant to be there for one reason or another. The entire principle behind this app is fucking asinine.
That said, if someone has a bladder, kidney, or other incontinence problem, I'm glad they have the RunPee app. Otherwise, for those of you who don't have those issues: drink responsibly and watch the movie.
Even at home: if you're multitasking during a movie, you didn't watch it. If you leave the room without pausing a movie, you didn't watch it. If you watch a movie on 1.5 or 2.0 speed, you didn't watch it. If you watch a movie while also looking at your phone, you didn't watch it. If you miss out on foreshadowing, your opinion on the ending "not making sense" is null and void.
If you're ever just listening to a movie, you're not truly experiencing it. The reason you didn't like it or feel it was lacking is because you were folding laundry. While a very important insert shot was there, you looked away, you missed a rack focus of an essential glance or wide shot with something important in the background. You walked out of the room and you heard a line delivery but you didn't see how the frame held the character. Edits, visual cues, blocking choices be damned: you definitely watched it, it was just mid.
When I watch a movie, I devote myself to it. I give it my full, undistracted attention during it and, after it ends, I roll certain things around in my head, unpacking them — there's great reward for curiosity and analysis. Sometimes if I don't like something, I don't always go by my immediate visceral reaction, I try to discern why I feel the way I do vs. why [x] decision was made. Sometimes that will happen in the first act and by act three, when new context is introduced that transforms the meaning of that initial moment, I'm over the moon if it adds to my experience. Or other times it won't hit me until weeks, months, or even years later after a rewatch or getting different perspective from someone else. The worst way to watch movies is to be dismissive.
But, of course, there are those who do this to a ridiculous degree, lost in copium-induced mental gymnastics so intricate they pretzel into absurdity. Calling bad cgi or lazy shot composition 'uncanny' isn't a tenable justification. So I try to be discerning; curiosity and skepticism are equally important.
But it annoys the living shit out of me when people separate filmmaking as "tHe TEcHniCaL SiDe" or criticize a movie for being 'sTyLE oVeR SubSTanCe".
Style is Substance. Like, saying "The technical aspects are really good, I just didn't connect with it" makes no sense, same with "I don't really care about the filmmaking, I'm interested in the story." This is visual storytelling, filmmakers spend hours of their time and money on their visual prose. Cinematography isn't just how good the lighting and color in a movie look, it's about how the camera is being used. Is there depth in the frame? Is there visual tension? What's the aesthetic in service of? The many, many 'technical aspects' determine whether or not you connect with it. A story's potency only matters if it's told well. A script has to be translated from the page onto the screen. If I don't enjoy a movie then that means it wasn't well-made. One of the director's jobs is to make sure the audience connects to the movie (and I'm not talking about 'Relatability' which is a fallacy unto itself, worth unpacking in another post). If you aren't engrossed then clearly the director failed.
Movies don't even need story to justify their existence. Like, I dislike Skinamarink because it failed to achieve what it set out to do. There are so many blunders that subtracted from my enjoyment of it. Like, I saw what he was aiming for and I saw him miss the target over and over. Now, if he had executed at the level he was aiming for, if he'd nailed the bullseye, it would be one of my favorite movies of this decade. But people bemoaning it as "barely a movie" or "not a movie at all" strictly on the basis that it has no story or plot aren't to be taken seriously. Purely observational cinema can function well if it's engaging enough and maintains consistent pacing. Same goes for character studies, hangout movies, abstract, experimental, et all forms of non story-driven Cinema. Any call for uniformity is needlessly limiting and tames this medium's versatility.
Beholding a movie to a universal template is already annoying and binding it to your own expectations is even worse. Engage with what something it is rather than dismissing it for what it isn't. I've seen more than enough criticisms of Magic Mike XXL as having a "terrible story" and they all make me laugh because it doesn't have any story; Something that doesn't exist has no barometer for quality. MMXXL is a roadtrip hangout buddy comedy about dudes who hate their day jobs and wanna dance. That's it. There's a bit of a narrative thrust with their destination but there are little to no stakes by design. One would know that if they actually watched the movie.
Just, please, pay attention.
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