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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Your analysis is extremely simplistic.

> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.

Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.

> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either

You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".

> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.

Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.

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A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to.

> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.

It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.

> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable

"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.

> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.

That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.

> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.

Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed it up and improve your experience.

There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.

Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.

It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.

> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.

Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?

I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?

Why are you even trying to argue this? You're repeatedly saying things like:

> Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good?

That's nonsense. You don't know if a movie is mediocre or consistently good until you watch it. Or it might be mostly very good with some not-so-good parts, in which it's better to watch it but watch the obviously not-so-good parts at 2x speed.

> But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end?

The fact that I've written screenplays, learned acting, done script analysis on literally hundreds of scenes from movies and television shows in educational contexts, lit scenes, shot scenes with actors, and edited them together?

I'm fast forwarding because I have a halfway decent knowledge of some of the craft and I don't feel like wasting my time with segments that exist purely for emotional heightening but little else. Empty calories, if you will.

There's no problem with my expectations, I assure you. I suggest you look in the mirror and ask why you feel so compelled to insist, judgmentally, that your way of watching movies is the right way, and speculate that a different way is somehow a sign of a problematic attention span. You're trying to insist you know some superior way of watching movies. Consider that, just maybe, you don't know as much as you think you do.

You're getting just as judgemental as them about what works better. And trying to pull rank isn't going to make you right.

Wrong. It's not being judgmental when I'm defending how I watch movies.

Not once have I told anyone else how they should watch movies. Meanwhile, the person I'm responding to is telling me how I should watch differently.

See the difference?

The person you're responding to argued that you have an attention span issue. That's not really the same as telling you what you should do.

And "It's boring. [...] Just speed it up and improve your experience." comes across pretty close to telling people what to do, at least as much as what bccdee said.

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