What do you feel is the biggest problem with modern entertainment

Yes, pretty much ^

Stand-up is still just a microphone (most the time). There's a couple I like, but even their work isn't as good as it was -- Bill Burr, Louis CK, Doug Stanhope, etc..




The talent is just not there. Those I mentioned above were grandfathered in. They would never make it today if they were new comics. There's no more artistic license. It's all conservative, corporate-approved products. Brands. No individuals. No rebels. No one who plays great and rocks the **** out from their ****ing heart. There is talent, we're just never shown it. I'm very thankful for YouTube for allowing me to avoid all the shit made in my lifetime. Listening to 70s Chicago (which became shit in the 80s coincidentally) right....

Oh, and this song comes on... I might need to wear sunglasses indoor if I'm going to "Takin It On Uptown"

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I spend a lot of time around a particular demographic of "today's youth", and this is simply incorrect, at least regarding the kids I work with.

Yes, I might question their taste, but they can give me scene-by-scene breakdowns of the movies they watch, including the Marvel films that are like a billion hours long. A lot of them watch documentaries on the History Channel or wherever.

I think that the volume and pace of information sharing these days makes it hard for anyone to not have split attention.

I’ll take the conclusions of multiple studies on globe attention spans over anecdotal evidence.

Everyone has been affected by it but it’s the children of today that are most susceptible.

There are definitely issues with attention spans, but entertainment (and specifically movie watching) honestly seems to be an area where I don't really notice an impact.

EDIT: And which studies are you referencing?

I've never read any studies on the matter, but speaking from personal experience, as a child and now as an adult, globes rarely hold my attention for more than 20-30 seconds. Spin it a few times, point out Hungary, and I'm ready to move on to something else.

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Oh iderno, over the years there have been plenty of globes in fillums that have captured and held my full attention .... you is just looking at the wrong kind mon ami

It is, if you're just trying squeeze what you can from Netflix. Apple seems to have solid options right now.

What you need to do is make a joke ONE TIME about them causing an earthquake, and the children will never stop picking up the globes and conspicuously dropping them in front of you.

Anyway, children will spend an absurd amount of time engaging with things that amuse or genuinely intellectually stimulate them. Saying that their attention spans are to blame for the state of entertainment today is something I find highly suspect.

Tricky thing about attention spans is that they exist in a causal loop: if people's attention spans shorten, mainstream stuff responds to that, which can worsen it, and so on.

I take it back. This is what’s wrong with modern entertainment: everything needing to be justified.

I’ve read journal articles from the early 90s, 00s and recently as a few years ago. The overarching trend is a downward slope in attention span. And it’s all predicated on advancements in tech and the dissemination of information: first television, then the internet, then smartphones, and now apps.*

It’s not my job to keep a list of everything I’ve read on the off chance someone doesn’t believe me, especially when half of it isn’t even accessible without a JSTOR or another academic membership. And I know from experience no one actually reads that stuff anyways. Ya know, diverted attention and all.

Movies, as a whole, have shifted to a format that is inherently short winded. Even the super long Marvel ones. Scene cuts, line deliveries, and storylines have morphed to high octane from the outset. The shortest path from dull to laughter/excitement/adrenaline is the cookie cutter mold of today, and movies that buck this trend either fail or have another compelling reason that makes them successful.

If you want a recent example take the new Jurassic World movie. I hear that movie is balls to the wall, and a far cry from the slow burn of Jurassic Park. Even the actors and director remarked on this fact in interviews when they said it’d be hard to make a movie like Jurassic Park now. I tend to agree.

Personally, I don’t mind it in the slightest. The quicker I can get my fix the better.

I guess. But is that a trend we are actually seeing in film?

The number one movie at the box office right now has a runtime of almost 150 minutes.

Looking at the runtimes for the top domestic box office films from 2021:
Spider-Man No Way Home, 148 min
Shang Chi, 132 min
Venom/Carnage, 97 min
Black Widow, 133 min
F9, 149 min
Eternals, 156 min
Sing 2, 112 min
No Time to Die, 163 min
A Quiet Place 2, 96 min
Ghostbusters, 125 min

I randomly picked 1985 as a comparison (which I hope is fair, I didn't want to look at all of the 80s to make sure):
Back to the Future, 116 min
Rambo 2, 96 min
Rocky 4, 90 min
The Color Purple, 152 min
Out of Africa, 161 min
Cocoon, 117 min
The Dream is Alive, 37 min (?!?!?!)
Jewel of the Nile, 106 min
Witness, 112 min
The Goonies, 114 min


Now, I'll admit that we might be seeing this nod to attention spans more within the films themselves (like in faster editing or whatever), and I don't know as much about that. I'm responding more to the idea that people today (and specifically the yutes *Cousin Vinny voice*) can't handle longer films.

Yeah, the length of the films mean absolutely nothing.

I think it's pretty tough to measure, yeah. 90 minutes of Terrance Malick can strain a teenager's attention span a lot more than 150 of the Avengers. I love me some hard data but I'm skeptical any can really exist on this point.

"Can't handle" isn't how I'd put it, anyway, both because that makes us want to think about individuals (when this is, if true, an aggregate trend) and because it implies inability rather than disinterest. "Can't" implies more than "Won't" which implies more than "Doesn't."

And this assumes a viewing at the theater rather than at home. If at home, how many are splitting that attention with a phone?

If we’re all for anecdotal evidence the number of people I’ve seen using their phone in a movie, including old people, has easily tripled in the past ten years. And I chalk that up to the explosion of cheap smartphones. But doesn’t that fact have a baring on attention? I’d like to think so.

Just between you, me, my bladder, and my large coke, it means quite a bit.

I was asking because I was curious. I read a lot about keeping children engaged, how to build endurance/stamina for concentration, and also about how different factors can impact attention. (For example, in children the symptoms of sleep deprivation and the symptoms of ADHD can have serious overlaps.)

There's a difference between saying that there's an overall decline in attention span (which I agree with) and saying That’s the sentiment of today’s youth. Good luck getting soup brains to sit still long enough for the trailers much less the main feature..

Movies and video games are two things that many kids can and will pay attention to for long periods of time. Like, I WISH my students had the same stamina for reading that they have for watching the latest Marvel movie.

I feel as if this is true even for movies that aren't mostly marketed to kids. I'm not disagreeing that a lot of entertainment pushes a "quick fix" approach, I'm just disagreeing that kids/teens are to blame.

No, no, the kids are definitely not to blame. That was never my argument. My argument was it was media formats like TikTok.

TikTok has created the greatest upheaval in power structures since the newspaper. Why should I listen to my teacher when I can learn from a TikTok, why should I listen to my parents when I can get advice from TikTok, why should I listen to the news when I can get it from a TikTok?

The kids are just the product. The rest of media is morphing to this fact. I’d say it’s precisely why movies have gotten longer. Entertainment companies know kids like this stuff and have to give a compelling reason to get them off the tiny screens and in front of a big one, so they give them more of what they want/love. Not less.

But that doesn’t mean it makes for good entertainment

That's exactly why I bailed on watching most new Hollywood films after the 2016 season was over. New indie films and foreign films can still be to my liking but video game-super fast editing is not what I what. Come to think of it, I blame the video game generation for creating a directors who make such crap. Yeah I said it's crap, like fast food is crap....Instant gratification, that's the cause of crappy Hollywood movies today

Whoa now. I don't know how much John McClane cares about you publicly sharing any watersports escapades you may have had.

As long as one finishes the large coke before peeing in it than it’s a-ok