People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Average movie length is increasing every year.
Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
Futurama nailed it.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
There is another (and supposedly final) in January 2026.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
Let me guess, an old man Brad Pitt enters the movie screen and says something like: “I’m gonna, I’m gonna… I’m gonna WROOOM! I’m WROOMING!!”?
Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
And the second example makes it harder by referencing a bell and an exchange
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
Still, surprising statistics.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
- HL Mencken
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
krukah•7h ago