Oof. What's next? Announcing what they see? What items are around them and how they could interact with them (or not)?
Like "Protagonist: I walked north and I entered a mysterious room, full of different bottles. They don't look like I could use them, but maybe I should take one with me?"
I think because people are 'watching' in a situation where twenty years ago they'd've put the radio on but now they default to 'fire something up on Netflix' and so Netflix wants to make things amenable to those customers.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it does at least make sense in terms of why Netflix are doing so.
Audio works on the subway, on the bike, while riding a bike, cleaning the house and the big one, driving a car. To get into a situation where you can both watch and listen is much rarer.
In general, although transparency on current AirPods is good, I really just am not comfortable with having music or other audio playing in my ears when I'm moving around outside--and certainly not in an urban setting.
I prefer the later version with Karl Urban - and to me it was expressive too.
Here’s a fun interview that includes a related question:
> Did having the helmet affect your acting at all? How did you maneuver around wearing that for the entire movie, and could you see through it?
> Oh yea [I could see through it], it took a bit to figure it out, it really did, and it was a challenge, you know, the challenge was how to communicate with an audience. And not only because my eyes weren’t visible, but because of the fact that the character of Dredd operates within a very narrow bandwidth, he is a man who has been trained to keep his emotions in check, so consequently it was very important for me to identify how I could humanize the character as much as possible. The sense of humor became very important, that dry, laconic sense of humor, and finding out where’s this character’s compassion? Where does his empathy lie?
I'd call that "endumbification". Netflix already lost giant chunks of its catalog as everyone and their dog now wants/has their own streaming shop (a worse situation than with cable TV now...), and it seems like they're going completely off the rails...
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
>Netflix execs have been telling their screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing” so that viewers who have a program on in the background can follow along without having to miss plot strands.
That's the critical bit of context, this is essentially radio you have on in the background while you do whatever.
Sometimes, I like watching the narrated movies meant for the visually impaired. It feels almost like an audiobook. Changing the content to make it more radio-like -- that's not something I'm a fan of. It's the whole "abstraction layers vs. tight coupling", except this time it's content.
Wes Anderson recently did a few short films from Roald Dahl stories that feel very strangely "wrong" in their almost 100% simply reading the stories out loud to actors miming along. It is so broken that it's fascinating and entirely works.
There is very little good or "main" content these days on Netflix. Every single time without fail whenever I have an urge to watch a specific show or movie, sometimes an old one, it's never available on Netflix. And even if they did have it, they "licensed" it for a year and no longer have it. What good is that for me?
So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having something playing on the side or background while we go about daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler that you don't need to pay attention to.
I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be give them money.
Personally it helps me sleep having "TV" playing in the background. But my SO uses it while she works, having something to break the monotony as music is distracting.
> Personally it helps me sleep having "TV" playing in the background.
That's fascinating to me, as I could not ever sleep with the TV on. Anything that has spoken voices keeps my brain turned on decoding the language and sleep is just not possible.
For background media, I found recordings of speedruns [0] with player commentary to strike the right balance, not being too distracting, yet giving a pleasant atmosphere (when, for example programming).
I don’t get it. The whole point of asking the actors to say something is to have it end up in the script. I’m suggesting that whatever they want them to say is relevant to training some AI. Just a theory but in its hypothetical context it does make sense.
Aha that's a really interesting tinfoil hat theory! I doubt it's true but reminds me of the recent YouTube drama about Google using the transcript to train their AI. Seeing Spotify generate ai music to bloat their library it is a nice harmless conspiracy theory for fun if nothing else.
Netflix is going to kill their golden goose. It's already dying slowly, but they really should be just taking more risks.
It's a streaming company run by people who seem to hate movies or tv.
I don't think their first-party content ever was a golden goose, I feel like it has always been their way to pad space between the good shows they bought from others.
Their golden goose was being the first to do streaming well. They just need to fund films and TV shows and then back them for longer than a season. The SV style thinking is what's killing potentially good shows.
Netflix’s own produced content is the poison that’s killing Netflix’s value proposition, not its golden goose.
It’s the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply because it makes them more money. But making them more money doesn’t entertain me so I unsubscribed.
I find it very stressful when watching Netflix because I don't know what is going to happen. Maybe they could include the full story line at the start of the series, so I can read it ahead of time and remove all suspense and surprise.
True, but plots are only half the story. I'd be very grateful if they could give me some sample scenes (ideally automatically, so I don't have to go through the trouble of starting them every single time). I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You can read review of journalists you usually agree with, ask for advice from your friends, check if you liked other movies from the same filmmaker, check if the movie has been displayed in your favorite movie theater or in the movie theater you dislike (but okay, won't work for netflix movies).
> I mean, how do people even decide whether a movie might be for them without having first inspected a good portion of it?
You’re describing watching the movie. Which is what most people do. If the movie is terrible then you just stop watching it, or if you finish it you can then decide if you liked it or not.
It's weird to me how the first two replies to this comment completely missed the sarcasm.
Do we need to start using the "/s" tag here like became necessary on reddit? I don't like the thought, but maybe it's a different issue in this case-- more of a non-native-English or on-the-spectrum thing than an inexperienced teenager thing? I hope so.
Those are all claims about the accent (my understanding of said claims is basically "sounds reasonable but also I have no idea what I'm talking about").
I was more thinking about the words/grammar/idiom etc.
(also as a Lancastrian I find e.g. Deep Somerset barely comprehensible, especially when the speaker is a few pints in, but their wording is still usually closer to mine than the USians' is)
You would likely be better with, say, Ian Hislop for me in terms of sarcasm, though while he's definitely a wit, no matter how hard I try I only ever seem to get half way.
Hmm. As a born Britisher I used to have this attitude until I read 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson. He's an American who moved to the UK and has a good handle on the differences between American and British english.
Any time one is tempted to post a sarcastic comment, it's good to re-read Poe's law[0] first. It does in fact always apply when posting on the internet.
What you seem to be missing is that people are reading your post in a non-sarcastic, non-ironic manner and agreeing with it. As Poe's law points out, that will always be the case.
Poe's law speaks to the size of the population on the internet and of the range of viewpoints it hosts as a result.
I am not OP; my simple point is that I don’t really care how “people” interpret my comments, and I will continue to write for those who _are_ clever enough to comprehend my intent (which one might imagine most people on this forum to be).
/s is would be more of an tone indicator for those who struggle to understand word communication portrayed by text.
In this case understanding the context of being sarcasm. It's annoying as you now have messages ending in /hj /lh.
Discord especially where the audience is young; but as we now cater to a world audience of those with disabilities and those without where do you tow the line?
Don't worry, they have got the perfect solution for you. That cool series you just heard about but haven't had time to watch yet? It's cancelled. That's it. That's the story. Now you don't even need to watch it!
I have them on a tin sign! My wife originally got it at Hobby Lobby, I think. I see them for sale on eBay if you are in need. Ours hangs directly above our tv.
I dearly miss intermissions at movie theaters. The theater I went to as a kid had them, and I can't understand why nobody else does. It's so useful to have the chance to get up and use the bathroom, or get a snack/drink, without missing part of the movie.
I do constantly have to tap out with the stress in many programs, takes me ages to pick up and finish programs. Many people need tension to drive a narrative forwards, but for me it often gets too much.
I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to have used this more and more.
The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV personalities.
The irony of your comment is that Horizon famously went through a phase of making programmes that were all about doom a while ago. Asteroids hitting the Earth, Global warming, food supply collapse, tsunamis, volcanos, etc - and all with portentious narration.
I just wish they wouldn‘t so disproportionally often drift off into extreme sillyness (That, I can take.) or extreme brutality and gore (That, I find revolting. When did showing so much splatter on a regular basis start being considered good film making outside of the occasional Tarantino?).
I sort of unironically agree with this. Time is limited and most tv and films don’t fit my criteria for “worth watching”, so I will read the plot synopsis for media that I think may be terrible, so I don’t have to find out later.
I suspect this appeals to two types of audiences. The first being people who play on their phones instead of watching the show. You can blame phone addiction and ADHD type behaviors for this but it feels like a slippery slope of stupidity in the face of good writing/acting as opposed to constant cartoon like action. (the wife and I do it too).
The second set of audience this would appeal to are people with autism. Sitcoms have always done this. Some people really need to be told when to laugh and what people are thinking because they have no ability to read body language, zero empathy, and cannot read the room. Once you encounter it regularly it’s mind blowing and that a significant portion of the population commonly lives with this sort of mental blindness.
I watch/listen to stuff when I do chores at home. If I am going to iron 30 things or knead a dough for 15 minutes, then it's nice to have some entertainment while doing it, even if I can't focus on it all the time. Not sure I fit into any of the two audiences you mention.
By the downvote I suspect you find this description of inattention, or chores, offensive. How is that, the complete inability to focus and the emotional hostility you imagine about it, not a form of ADHD?
Try doing chores for multiple people, hours a day, years on end, first. I’m guessing you haven’t done that, or you wouldn’t suggest that people who like having a little entertainment while doing chores have a form of ADHD.
Well then the comment chain was clearer to you than me, because I read the last two comments as 1) a defense of watching shows while doing chores and 2) a criticism of doing that, implying that it’s a lack of focus on doing the chore
I suspect the confusion is the concept of white noise. Some people can focus on some form media and a work/chore equally at the same such that neither is background noise. I enjoy playing music while I drive or doing dishes only because I enjoy the music. The work effort is accomplished in the same time with the same quality either way, but some people need the background noise to help focus on what would otherwise be a slow and painful effort marked by continuous interruption and slipping precision.
That is the distinction of ADHD. Self reflection, the bit about offense, is important because for the person without attention disruption there isn’t a performance difference to reflect upon, but for other people there is an issue of concern.
I don’t think white noise has anything to do with the topic. Some people get bored doing chores and therefore watch a movie or listen to a podcast in the background.
It has nothing to do with optimizing performance of a task. Doing the laundry for your family for the 10,000th time is a chore, not a task that is optimized.
This is a pretty common thing to do, so I’m not sure why this is so confusing.
I think that listening to radio while driving is less of an indication of autistic behavior than thinking that someone listening to the radio is exhibiting autistic behavior.
A common misconception. Autistic people have emotions and empathy- perhaps more than other people. They just keep it inside.
Also no Seinfeld is not funny.
So, autism is a spectrum of common disorders that vary from person to person. Therefore people are not diagnosed on the basis of noted disorders but instead on their performance in a battery of common performance tests.
As for empathy, it too varies from person to person. It is possible, though unlikely, to score high in empathy and yet utterly fail all the rest of the performance criteria. One of my coworkers with autistic children may or may not have autism themselves but does demonstrate high empathy.
In my experience people with autism tend to score remarkably low in empathy with some people even having absolutely no empathy at all. That is why many people with autism seem socially weird or have trouble reading a room. For people with high empathy these observations of low empathy in others is most obvious potential indicator of autism.
While very few people score high in empathy it’s equally rare to absolutely have no empathy at all. It is such a striking disadvantage as to be a major disorder. It is severe enough that it looks like sociopathy minus an informed intent. It’s a processing void. That void is further obviated by an equally diminished introspective capability in that reading one’s self is the same skill as reading others.
Also, empathy is not in any way related the quantity of emotions people display. A person can be both selfish and highly emotional.
Netflix thought they could take on Hollywood and beat them at their own film game. But in the process they realized that it’s not actually a game worth winning, and more importantly, that YouTube and TikTok are their real competition, not Hollywood.
The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix probably understands this and is trying to get away from the historical model as movies you watch online and closer to the optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.
Can you please explain what this optimized video ecosystem of youtube is actually optimized for other than clickbait? Maybe it works for others but i fell into this for a while and now i look at it in disgust.
Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many other content types that I wouldn’t characterize that way: 3+ hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc. YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of different kinds of content.
My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.
Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.
I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.
I can see this working for individuals but what about families? And although i dont feel thinking too much about netflixes business it raises the question if this would requre to adapt their model to an ad based model rather than subscription.
Anyhow- i see a gigantic problem coming towards us caused by rapidly decreasing attention capacities and this does not help.
Not sure what you mean by families, but I would be willing to bet that most families today already let their children watch more YouTube family content than Netflix content.
And I do believe Netflix introduced a cheaper ad tier recently?
Every parent I know forbids Youtube, for obvious reasons. Even the content on the Kids service is utter crap (I know several who tried the service and dropped it.)
we’ve all seen the people with the kid glued to youtube and clearly self-navigating. just because there are many people doing this doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
(Also a parent) there are two ways to use Youtube. One is to let the child choose what to watch and, I agree, this is a disaster. There's no possible guardrails that would work with their current algorithmic models. The other is to find things they (or I) are interested in, particularly tutorials, and then watch them together and then apply that to real life. It is a fantastic tutorial device and my kids have learned how to do things I wouldn't have known how to do or teach myself. I don't think there is a better substitute for this use case.
Yep, YouTube is banned for our daughter except for pre-vetted videos as the content and ads can’t be trusted. We tried the Kids app but the content was 99% terrible.
I do recommend The Kid Should See This though, a really good selection of curated videos.
Youtube still has massive variety and quality of production. I've largely been able to avoid the clickbait-optimized videos by curating my subscriptions. I've found about a dozen creators who's content I regularly watch. Many of them create YouTube videos as secondary to some other hobby or profession. Most are trending towards the clickbait thumbnail, but few are actually changing their content in that direction.
Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.
> My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
HN spans this incredible gamut from “Turing-award winner chimes in on their field of expertise” to stuff like this that just puts you in awe how pozzed some people are.
I think that those of us who live in the HN bubble, who tend to be more intentional and minimalist about our technology choices, are often out of touch with 90+% of users. My wife is my daily reminder of, and window into, the technology world that most people live in.
I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording, encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images[1]. My wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me the ones that she likes) and I'm baffled by how many are just scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).
Any video streaming application worth its salt will stop downloading the video track if the user backgrounds the application, turns off the screen or otherwise makes the video surface not visible, so there's no bandwidth wasted in that particular scenario. This is of course somewhat diminished by people not actually turning the video off in many scenarios - and I'm not even sure Netflix supports backgrounded playback, for that matter.
Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same size as the video track.
As I cannot read the article without tapping 'Accept' on the monstrously big cookie pop-up (tapping "Manage Settings" leads to an even bigger pop-up whose presumed buttons are outside of the (non-scrollable) viewport), I'm going to comment without having read TFA, only the comments on here.
I am surprised that no one mentions these extra narrations as providing very valuable audio descriptions for visually impaired users. This in my opinion is a much more important use case, as long as it remains optional, selectable as a separate audio channel for example.
Streaming with a subscription is fundamentally a bad thing for cinema, especially when combined with the streamer also producing content. That's because it shifts the optimized variable from quality of individual movie/show to maximum time spent on platform. But the latter can accept the lowering of the quality of individual movies, so you get a regression towards average instead of a striving for excellence.
Never paid for a subscription and never will, precisely because I want to pay for individual movies to reward them for being good movies.
This is less of a streaming subscription issue as much as a Netflix issue. Netflix doesn't have to use the metric of "time spent on platform". Their goal seems to want to be the everything-streaming-app and are willing to produce mountains of swill to get there.
For example with their TV-style content, Netflix starting churning out tons of cheaply produced baking and cooking competition shows during the pandemic -- probably due to the popularity of "The Great British Bake-off". Whatever they were going for, they didn't capture the magic of it, nor did their cooking competition shows capture the magic of "Iron Chef" despite the blatant struggle to do so.
Compare this to HBO. HBO has been subscription far before streaming was a thing and they have an excellent track record of regularly producing quality series with a subscription model.
In HBO's TV era post-2000, you have The Wire, Sopranos, Entourage, Boardwalk Empire, among many others. As things moved to streaming (2012-), there's Game of Thrones, Succession, Barry, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Veep, etc. It seems, on average, every year there's a new must-watch series that ranks well with both critics and viewers.
While there's skepticism about HBO maintaining it's legacy after the Discovery-Warner merger, Apple TV seems to be filling HBO's shoes.
Perhaps Netflix ought to consider cutting back the number of series it's churning out.
Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan, which was the only option until recently. It is completely different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which get most of their revenue from ads.
They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel their subscriptions.
If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not for the better though.
>If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe.
Most people are probably lazier and less organized than you give them credit for. If subscribe/unsubscribe cycles were really that prevalent I think you'd see a lot more incentives to sign up for, say, annual subscriptions.
A lot of people basically use TV as background and, especially if they don't have live TV, that means a lot of streaming content.
In the beginning they were not, but it is changing. With Netflix price hikes (about +40% in 10 years, inflation adjusted), competing streaming platforms, each with their own exclusives, and crackdowns on shared accounts, "pausing" is becoming more and more common.
People don't need more than one streaming platform for "background noise", and switching to the one with the most popular shows of the month makes a lot of economic sense. At the end of the year, it can easily save you hundreds of dollars, and the bigger the amount, the more people are going to do the maths.
This is likely being blown way out of proportion. I'm not defending this behavior but the article listed exactly one example: Irish Wish. I'm sure it appeals to a certain audience but it's not what I, personally, would call peak cinema.
My guess is that this guidance was given to a specific writer or person in charge of a specific genre.
Exactly. The one example they use gets a 5.2 on IMDB and 42% on rotten tomatoes.
Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It’s for a certain audience. We’ve had crappy made-for-TV movies since long before streaming and it hasn’t been the death of cinema.
To be fair to the professional critics, they are writing prose that helps their readers decide if they will like a movie, not just giving it a good/bad review. Looking at the reviews that RT considers fresh, most of them are honest with their readers about what the movie is (“hallmark”, “formulaic”), but consider it a watchable entry in that genre.
Who are you to say that is wrong? Everyone has their own preference for what they like to see in art, and one man's preference is no more correct than another.
The article listed lots of examples... It's an exceptionally long article so you'd be forgiven for missing them, but there are definitely many examples given.
In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this article - the point it's making is a good one but the article is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.
The original link was https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr... which is probably what your parent is commenting on. Some people complained that that's basically a blogspam article that recycles n+1's article, others disagreed and argued there's value in a focused short article - it seems like mods agree with the complainers and changed the link silently to the current one.
It’s supposedly ragebait but it’s not actually bad.
- Netflix produces the casual viewing content next to other niches, and just serves this as well. The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.
- This is something you can put on during long car trips, no need to focus on the screen, just focus on the audio, and it’s easier to listen to than an audiobook (which is just a narrated actual book).
- It has nothing to do with “endumbification”, even it it appears to be framed that way. People are still smart.
I am convinced that if we design media to be consumed while doing something else it will ultimately be to the detriment of the media itself. What will happen next is netflix shifting even more towards reality-tv and then end up just like MTV.
I'm not going to bother with any new Netflix originals since they rug-pulled Inside Job, but I don't think this is the end of the world if it's done well. Rocky & Bullwinkle is like this and it only enhances it. Put this on in the background and see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7fbc9gMiE
It’s just slop par excellence. I’ve been watching a number of movies with my wife over Christmas. Everything is so bland, repetitive and ‘design by committee’. It goes further than merely announcing what the characters are doing (in that new wannabe Die Hard movie we hear that they are expecting a baby three times in 5 minutes), you just know there are certain metrics used for every genre of movie accounting for every minute: “if it’s an action film with no action scene in the first 10 minutes then the audience loses interest”. They are all so soulless.
And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
There are a ton of great Christmas movies on Netflix. We just watched Christmas Chronicles again last night. Klaus is great. The Wallace and Gromit ones…I could go on
Maybe you aren’t being suggested kids movies. Most Xmas productions are. The hallmark/romance style of Xmas movie seems to be for housewives.
And there are lots of people who just want background noise. Before streaming it was just leaving the TV on while you did other stuff. Before that it was radio. Daytime programming has always been like this.
My god I did not get the double life of Veronique at all. She was sleeping for 50% of the film, and random other stuff happened for the rest. However, it's worth it just for Preisner's score, SBI 152 is a masterpiece.
It’s amazing the checkboxes that stick out: having a dog for no reason for dog lovers; the relationship slop that appeals to women; the violence and sex slop to appeal to men.
I wouldn't describe myself as a "heavy pornography consumer", but I certainly get bored by the gratuitous sex scenes in many shows and movies these days, thinking, "I can get this and much more any time I want, so can we stop with it and move the plot and/or character development along please?"
Honestly I can't blame them if current audiences have the attention span of a puppy golden retriever
The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts
That would probably make every such movie rated 18+, unless you limit the controls somehow and they find a way to make sure nothing too violent happens on any given setting, or pre-render every single configuration and have reviewers check them all.
They're not fine-grained enough IMO - IMDB's "parent's guide" is great for detailed content information.
Similarly, with game ratings (video- and boardgames, as it happens), I appreciate them, but often they're trying to do two things, rate the game content and the gameplay. They fail often, and I buy outside the ratings, but I'm happier having them than not having any information in that space.
I wouldn't want no ratings for film/TV as that would mean I'd have to seek out spoiler-level information before finding if media was right for what I wanted to consume (or take friends/family to consume). I try my best to see little about the plot of films I'm keen to watch.
This was actually something that was tried with music in the early 90s, by Philips and Sony with the CD-i. The musician/producer Todd Rundgren made an album specifically for this format called "No World Order" where the songs were all broken up into "modules", so to speak, and the user could configure them however they'd like.
Highbrow and soulless are different axes. Disney may be a giant soulless company, but they do employ actual artists who sometimes make decent movies which in general do vastly better at the box office.
Handing a talented team enough time, freedom, and budget doesn’t guarantee success but it’s definitely a prerequisite for success.
I'm more interested in movies that make money through the long tail of DVD sales. Box office numbers have always favoured blockbusters. The long tail content tends to be better, less one-size-fits-all, and allows room for multiple films trying different things, across different genres. That era appears to be over however.
I think the best modern productions are now the series rather than the films as there's so much more time to tell the story and have room for characters to breathe etc.
Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.
As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.
I haven't heard that at all. As I understand it, the music is written to go with certain scenes, but it complements the action and adds a lot of emotional beats. I can't think of an example where it's simply describing what's going on on-screen.
The music is a huge part of Arcane though, and complements the emotional content.
e.g. The Line (Twenty-One Pilots) was written after Tyler Joseph witnessed the passing of his grandmother and is written from her viewpoint - incredibly powerful and poignant, but also fits in wonderfully with what is happening with Victor (Arcane character).
Maybe 5 years ago but can't say I agree any more. Netflix in particular stretches 2-hour scripts into 10-hour limited series. I'm trying to watch Black Doves right now and continually get bored at how much exposition and background there is. There was clearly a tight, fun script in there somewhere before the committee performed surgery on it. I don't need everything explored and explained to death, give me something with rhythm instead.
That's just reminded me of an article I read recently about "What We Do In The Shadows", where Clement/Waititi originally thought that the idea was a ten minute sketch ("vampires, but they're stupid") that they managed to stretch out into a whole film. Of course, then they stretched it out even further into 6 seasons of a series (not counting Wellington Paranormal).
Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've come to expect from mainstream productions.
A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.
And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!
I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it. If I recall correctly, that scene was an animated cameo by Imagine Dragons who do the theme tune (Enemy) for Arcane.
Personally, I hadn't had any contact with League of Legends and knew none of the lore before watching Arcane, but was thoroughly taken with the incredible art and story-telling. What I find surprising is the amount of character development they manage to incorporate - the first season had meaningful character arcs for almost all the characters (maybe two side characters were left out). The second season feels a bit more rushed though.
This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.
What I hate is that the slop killed the netflix DVD service, where I used to get the "real" movies to watch.
It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and everyone goes the same slow speed.
Valentine to Harry Hart, “You know what this is like? It’s like those old movies we both love. Now, I’m going to tell you my whole plan, and then I’m going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you, and you’ll find an equally convoluted way to escape.”
One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
I enjoyed Upstream Color a lot as well, but yeah it's certainly not for everyone.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and no hand-holding.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
Seen Primer first, though it’s 100% due a rewatch. I think it lacks certain poetry that Upstream Color has.
I don’t know if we should denounce the art if the artist turns out to be a bad person in some ways, previously had some thoughts about it but forgot what they were. Maybe the answer is “we should if we know about it”. However, no person is unchanging, and by that logic the person who creates the art is not the same entity as the person who does bad things, unless it happens in close enough proximity or relation to each other.
I do generally separate the art from the artist, it just sucks given that Seimetz starred in Upstream Color, which is definitely proximal.
For example, I recently watched It Ends with Us, a book-turned-movie about a woman, played by Blake Lively, dealing with physical and sexual abuse from her boyfriend, played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie. Well, it just came out that he and other staff sexually harassed her constantly throughout the filming of the movie. That would make any rewatch significantly more difficult for me, as I know that Lively did not enjoy the process and that the director, someone with power over her, treated her as such.
Personal issues aside, Carruth ultimately had a professional responsibility to Seimetz which he broke, and his subsequent behavior and general rejection of the Hollywood apparatus means we likely won't get any more films from him.
However, I don't want to derail the discussion away from Upstream Color or Carruth's other work. Just mentioned that because it saddened me.
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
I'm thinking about unsubscribing from Netflix, only my wife discovered they have Friends. So I'm not.
It's not the new stuff that pulls me into Netflix. Instead I go to Paramount+. As it turns out, these guys actually know how to tell a compelling story. Nobody is more surprised than me!
But it is hilarious in a meta kind of way that a bottom feeder "summarize real writing done by others, and slap on a clickbait headline" website pretends to have the moral high ground on this issue. I wonder what the guidance they give t to their writers is, and what metrics they're pushed to improve.
That article has a lot of quality but it also has a lot of telling the history of Netflix. Of the eight sections, I'd only really recommend the first plus a paragraph, then 6-8, maybe 5-8.
I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.
This article is very informative article, but it is funny that it seems to imply that Netflix is somehow essentially evil, compared to the artsy heros of the 90s, such as Harvey Weinstein's Miramax.
I don’t remember the program but in the years of broadcast TV there was a writer on a nightly talk show explaining why all TV episodes were so bland. He said that he wrote an intricate plot for TV which was rejected because the show had to be watchable by someone doing this dishes. So this isn’t a phenomenon new to the Netflix era.
Many years ago when I was in college, one of my professors wrote a Star Trek Next Generation script, and she talked about how the producers pretty much destroyed her story by insisting she stick to the formula such as "between X and Y minutes, the Enterprise or one of the main characters must be in danger. That danger must be resolved by minute Z." Sigh.
Since not every episode follows that formula, I wonder if that's a requirement specifically of spec script writers because they'd want to keep the more important/interesting episodes written by staff.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadLike "Protagonist: I walked north and I entered a mysterious room, full of different bottles. They don't look like I could use them, but maybe I should take one with me?"
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it does at least make sense in terms of why Netflix are doing so.
Audio works on the subway, on the bike, while riding a bike, cleaning the house and the big one, driving a car. To get into a situation where you can both watch and listen is much rarer.
Terribly terrible.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/judge-dredd-1995
Here’s a fun interview that includes a related question:
> Did having the helmet affect your acting at all? How did you maneuver around wearing that for the entire movie, and could you see through it?
> Oh yea [I could see through it], it took a bit to figure it out, it really did, and it was a challenge, you know, the challenge was how to communicate with an audience. And not only because my eyes weren’t visible, but because of the fact that the character of Dredd operates within a very narrow bandwidth, he is a man who has been trained to keep his emotions in check, so consequently it was very important for me to identify how I could humanize the character as much as possible. The sense of humor became very important, that dry, laconic sense of humor, and finding out where’s this character’s compassion? Where does his empathy lie?
NOTE: minor generic plot references follow.
https://reelreactions.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/reel-reaction...
> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
That's the critical bit of context, this is essentially radio you have on in the background while you do whatever.
I guess netflix is really competing against youtube and twitch here.
So most of our usage these days of Netflix is just having something playing on the side or background while we go about daily tasks like working or whatever. It's glorified filler that you don't need to pay attention to.
I'm giving it a year maybe and I'm canceling our sub to Netflix. There are better alternatives, and life is too precious to spend worrying about copyright when all copyright holders just want to make me a criminal instead of letting be give them money.
That's fascinating to me, as I could not ever sleep with the TV on. Anything that has spoken voices keeps my brain turned on decoding the language and sleep is just not possible.
[0] for example as found on YouTube.
It’s the reason I, and others I know, unsubscribed. Over time it edged out all the movies I actually wanted to watch simply because it makes them more money. But making them more money doesn’t entertain me so I unsubscribed.
Turns out that catering to dumb consumer zombies is still a safe bet.
You can read review of journalists you usually agree with, ask for advice from your friends, check if you liked other movies from the same filmmaker, check if the movie has been displayed in your favorite movie theater or in the movie theater you dislike (but okay, won't work for netflix movies).
You’re describing watching the movie. Which is what most people do. If the movie is terrible then you just stop watching it, or if you finish it you can then decide if you liked it or not.
Do we need to start using the "/s" tag here like became necessary on reddit? I don't like the thought, but maybe it's a different issue in this case-- more of a non-native-English or on-the-spectrum thing than an inexperienced teenager thing? I hope so.
Then again from the UK POV the leftpondians barely count as native English speakers anyway ;)
[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...
I was more thinking about the words/grammar/idiom etc.
(also as a Lancastrian I find e.g. Deep Somerset barely comprehensible, especially when the speaker is a few pints in, but their wording is still usually closer to mine than the USians' is)
To be fair, I'm probably less informed for doing so.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Poe's law speaks to the size of the population on the internet and of the range of viewpoints it hosts as a result.
In this case understanding the context of being sarcasm. It's annoying as you now have messages ending in /hj /lh.
Discord especially where the audience is young; but as we now cater to a world audience of those with disabilities and those without where do you tow the line?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_indicator
Counterpoint, it's weird to me to be surprised to encounter a problem when you knowingly avoid preventing that problem.
You can award the content exactly as much time as it deserves according to you.
/me sings "Let's all go to the lobby! Let's all go to the lobby! Let's all go to the lobby ... and get ourselves a snack!"
Anyone else remember the dancing cartoon popcorn and coca-cola cup?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/167000652001
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWvt3E5a-AA
I remember 80 Days Around the world where peril of missing a connection gave it tension; ever since documentaries seem to have used this more and more.
The BBC Horizon episode on Voyager passing Jupiter was so inspirational to me, but now we just being ridden by TV personalities.
Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Mystery, and Rebirth.
The second set of audience this would appeal to are people with autism. Sitcoms have always done this. Some people really need to be told when to laugh and what people are thinking because they have no ability to read body language, zero empathy, and cannot read the room. Once you encounter it regularly it’s mind blowing and that a significant portion of the population commonly lives with this sort of mental blindness.
That is the distinction of ADHD. Self reflection, the bit about offense, is important because for the person without attention disruption there isn’t a performance difference to reflect upon, but for other people there is an issue of concern.
It has nothing to do with optimizing performance of a task. Doing the laundry for your family for the 10,000th time is a chore, not a task that is optimized.
This is a pretty common thing to do, so I’m not sure why this is so confusing.
So you imagine that I downvoted you, and then you claim that I imagine emotional hostility and as a result diagnose me with some form of ADHD?
Wild.
They're using the word empathy wrong but trouble reading emotion sounds accurate enough.
As for empathy, it too varies from person to person. It is possible, though unlikely, to score high in empathy and yet utterly fail all the rest of the performance criteria. One of my coworkers with autistic children may or may not have autism themselves but does demonstrate high empathy.
In my experience people with autism tend to score remarkably low in empathy with some people even having absolutely no empathy at all. That is why many people with autism seem socially weird or have trouble reading a room. For people with high empathy these observations of low empathy in others is most obvious potential indicator of autism.
While very few people score high in empathy it’s equally rare to absolutely have no empathy at all. It is such a striking disadvantage as to be a major disorder. It is severe enough that it looks like sociopathy minus an informed intent. It’s a processing void. That void is further obviated by an equally diminished introspective capability in that reading one’s self is the same skill as reading others.
Also, empathy is not in any way related the quantity of emotions people display. A person can be both selfish and highly emotional.
The future of most media is video-based, and I think Netflix probably understands this and is trying to get away from the historical model as movies you watch online and closer to the optimized video ecosystem of YouTube. The latter is more relevant in a world with video-playing devices everywhere.
Inadvertently an Inglorious Basterds paraphrase?
_Brief him._
My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.
Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.
I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.
Anyhow- i see a gigantic problem coming towards us caused by rapidly decreasing attention capacities and this does not help.
And I do believe Netflix introduced a cheaper ad tier recently?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251942/global-youtube-k...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1301730/us-time-spent-ch...
I do recommend The Kid Should See This though, a really good selection of curated videos.
https://thekidshouldseethis.com/
You might find your child spending 2 hours a day on ddg.
Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.
Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.
HN spans this incredible gamut from “Turing-award winner chimes in on their field of expertise” to stuff like this that just puts you in awe how pozzed some people are.
Next to save bandwidth they’ll drop video and just display text on screen.
[1] https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066
Talking heads are equivalent to (badly written) text only content too.
Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same size as the video track.
I am surprised that no one mentions these extra narrations as providing very valuable audio descriptions for visually impaired users. This in my opinion is a much more important use case, as long as it remains optional, selectable as a separate audio channel for example.
Never paid for a subscription and never will, precisely because I want to pay for individual movies to reward them for being good movies.
For example with their TV-style content, Netflix starting churning out tons of cheaply produced baking and cooking competition shows during the pandemic -- probably due to the popularity of "The Great British Bake-off". Whatever they were going for, they didn't capture the magic of it, nor did their cooking competition shows capture the magic of "Iron Chef" despite the blatant struggle to do so.
Compare this to HBO. HBO has been subscription far before streaming was a thing and they have an excellent track record of regularly producing quality series with a subscription model.
In HBO's TV era post-2000, you have The Wire, Sopranos, Entourage, Boardwalk Empire, among many others. As things moved to streaming (2012-), there's Game of Thrones, Succession, Barry, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Veep, etc. It seems, on average, every year there's a new must-watch series that ranks well with both critics and viewers.
While there's skepticism about HBO maintaining it's legacy after the Discovery-Warner merger, Apple TV seems to be filling HBO's shoes.
Perhaps Netflix ought to consider cutting back the number of series it's churning out.
Not even that, they optimize for acquiring and keeping subscribers. They gain nothing from you watching movies, it is just costing them bandwidth, at least on their ad-free plan, which was the only option until recently. It is completely different from YouTube and TikTok, or even oldschool TV, which get most of their revenue from ads.
They need a few good ones to attract new subscribers, and they do. Stranger Things and Squid Games are really good. For the rest, they just need enough content for people not to cancel their subscriptions.
If you want to encourage quality production, just subscribe for the month they are doing something good, ad-free of course, then unsubscribe. Many people are doing that, and maybe that's what it takes to get them to change their strategy. Maybe not for the better though.
Most people are probably lazier and less organized than you give them credit for. If subscribe/unsubscribe cycles were really that prevalent I think you'd see a lot more incentives to sign up for, say, annual subscriptions.
A lot of people basically use TV as background and, especially if they don't have live TV, that means a lot of streaming content.
People don't need more than one streaming platform for "background noise", and switching to the one with the most popular shows of the month makes a lot of economic sense. At the end of the year, it can easily save you hundreds of dollars, and the bigger the amount, the more people are going to do the maths.
Maybe an annual Netflix subscription is planned.
My guess is that this guidance was given to a specific writer or person in charge of a specific genre.
Not all movies are high art, nor should they be. It’s for a certain audience. We’ve had crappy made-for-TV movies since long before streaming and it hasn’t been the death of cinema.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/irish_wish/reviews
In fact that's actually what my main complaint is about this article - the point it's making is a good one but the article is probably 5x longer than it needs to be.
- Netflix produces the casual viewing content next to other niches, and just serves this as well. The other stuff doesn’t go away, this is in addition.
- This is something you can put on during long car trips, no need to focus on the screen, just focus on the audio, and it’s easier to listen to than an audiobook (which is just a narrated actual book).
- It has nothing to do with “endumbification”, even it it appears to be framed that way. People are still smart.
They could add a tag saying if you need to pay attention to the show or not. Currently it isn't very different from the other stuff just disappearing.
I do like trading stocks but it does seem like it's the #1 reason for companies to turn into shit.
And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
Seems to me they provide what the market wants.
Maybe you aren’t being suggested kids movies. Most Xmas productions are. The hallmark/romance style of Xmas movie seems to be for housewives.
And there are lots of people who just want background noise. Before streaming it was just leaving the TV on while you did other stuff. Before that it was radio. Daytime programming has always been like this.
It’s not a Netflix invention.
Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Strange Darling (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
The Night House (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
Midnight Special (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
The Devil's Candy (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
A Most Wanted Man (2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
In a Savage Land (1999) verisimi ↗ You do know that its ok to turn off the TV too? Lol magicalhippo ↗ ok recently was stretching it, I've watched these over the past year or so. 1123581321 ↗ Wow, great to see The Fall is on Mubi. That's one I had to pirate as it wasn't available anywhere. magicalhippo ↗ It's getting a 4k Blu-ray release soon AFAIK. Will definitely pick it up. stavros ↗ My god I did not get the double life of Veronique at all. She was sleeping for 50% of the film, and random other stuff happened for the rest. However, it's worth it just for Preisner's score, SBI 152 is a masterpiece.
This.
Netflix does have good productions. But they are often surrounded by the sea of mediocracy.
Stopped subscribing to N over a year ago and haven't missed it a single bit.
Isn't it true for the whole film industry? Among the highest grossing movies from recent years, how many follow a different approach?
The one use case I wanted to see for AI is "tunable" contexts for videos. If this is your first time, watch the whole thing but if you need less context just edit it so it skips over the obvious parts
They're not fine-grained enough IMO - IMDB's "parent's guide" is great for detailed content information.
Similarly, with game ratings (video- and boardgames, as it happens), I appreciate them, but often they're trying to do two things, rate the game content and the gameplay. They fail often, and I buy outside the ratings, but I'm happier having them than not having any information in that space.
I wouldn't want no ratings for film/TV as that would mean I'd have to seek out spoiler-level information before finding if media was right for what I wanted to consume (or take friends/family to consume). I try my best to see little about the plot of films I'm keen to watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_World_Order
I don't think it's possible yet by a very very very long shot but if it were it would be a better idea than "write your own movies".
My stories probably suck outside a captive, very young and related "audience" which is fine because I'm not script writer.
But I would pay quite a lot of money for a "get to the point" button.
then you're missing the point of storytelling.
Handing a talented team enough time, freedom, and budget doesn’t guarantee success but it’s definitely a prerequisite for success.
Just look at the artistry and story-telling skill displayed in both seasons of Arcane - there's so many brilliant examples of "showing, not telling" on display there.
As a counter-example, I enjoyed watching the "Flow" film the other day - an animated film about a cat (and other animals) trying to survive a flood and there's not even a single word in the entire film.
The music is a huge part of Arcane though, and complements the emotional content.
e.g. The Line (Twenty-One Pilots) was written after Tyler Joseph witnessed the passing of his grandmother and is written from her viewpoint - incredibly powerful and poignant, but also fits in wonderfully with what is happening with Victor (Arcane character).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Rj2gQAyPA
Some of my favourite recent series haven't been from Netflix - Slow Horses, Day of the Jackal etc.
A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.
And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!
I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.
Personally, I hadn't had any contact with League of Legends and knew none of the lore before watching Arcane, but was thoroughly taken with the incredible art and story-telling. What I find surprising is the amount of character development they manage to incorporate - the first season had meaningful character arcs for almost all the characters (maybe two side characters were left out). The second season feels a bit more rushed though.
It sort of feels like living in a town that is getting crowded and the infrastructure isn't being maintained. Then one day they decide to change all the traffic lights to stop signs and everyone goes the same slow speed.
She chooses to watch shows in which characters address each other with full names and say their intentions out loud. My brain hurts.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
I don’t know if we should denounce the art if the artist turns out to be a bad person in some ways, previously had some thoughts about it but forgot what they were. Maybe the answer is “we should if we know about it”. However, no person is unchanging, and by that logic the person who creates the art is not the same entity as the person who does bad things, unless it happens in close enough proximity or relation to each other.
For example, I recently watched It Ends with Us, a book-turned-movie about a woman, played by Blake Lively, dealing with physical and sexual abuse from her boyfriend, played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie. Well, it just came out that he and other staff sexually harassed her constantly throughout the filming of the movie. That would make any rewatch significantly more difficult for me, as I know that Lively did not enjoy the process and that the director, someone with power over her, treated her as such.
Personal issues aside, Carruth ultimately had a professional responsibility to Seimetz which he broke, and his subsequent behavior and general rejection of the Hollywood apparatus means we likely won't get any more films from him.
However, I don't want to derail the discussion away from Upstream Color or Carruth's other work. Just mentioned that because it saddened me.
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
It's not the new stuff that pulls me into Netflix. Instead I go to Paramount+. As it turns out, these guys actually know how to tell a compelling story. Nobody is more surprised than me!
But it is hilarious in a meta kind of way that a bottom feeder "summarize real writing done by others, and slap on a clickbait headline" website pretends to have the moral high ground on this issue. I wonder what the guidance they give t to their writers is, and what metrics they're pushed to improve.
I wouldn't call the OP clickbait, it's a reasonable title for the focus of the article. And I appreciate it having focus.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html