I scroll through a list of “the 100 best [movie / tv shows]” and literally 99% of them looks boring af. Is life just this boring, or does my brain just suck?
‘Boring’ is a lazy assessment that says nothing. Dig deeper. Why do you think a given thing would be boring? What about it specifically do you think you won’t enjoy?
Once you learn to start asking yourself those types of questions, you can start looking for things that actually interest you, rather than dismissing everything out of hand.
Hitting the real deepy deeps right here 🫵👌
A top 100 movies list is likely aimed at film buffs but if you aren’t into those same things, the movies aren’t gonna do anything for you.
There’s nothing wrong with being a casual fan, though. People get very hung up on sticking to “the best” but it’s just entertainment. Watch what you like
Pretty picky. I watch less shows and movies because there’s a content desert when you’re picky. Not a problem for me because video games has the extreme opposite problem. Especially when I’m also into emulation, hacks, translations, reverse engineered servers, whatever. Everything to do with games. Wish lists exceed lifespan.
Books are different because I have Aphantasia. Any author who likes writing long inner monologues and detailed environment descriptions is what I’ll look for, with fiction anyway.
Music I rarely look at reviews. My biggest influencer is CKUA, a local donor supported radio station. Also I just scroll sites like Bandcamp for a couple hours now and then until I stumble into somethings I like and bookmark them. If I keep listening to an album or whatever and still like it after a couple days, then I’ll buy. I’m pretty disconnected this regard I guess.
Social influences too of course, self explanatory.
Basically at this point I need something spoiled to me by a literary analyst just to be able to tell if it’s worth my time.
I don’t think your brain sucks I think our ability to enjoy art now is just hamstringed by the unending glut of designed-by-comittee trash and the time demands of late stage capitalism
Tangentially related: I recently read American Kingpin, a book about Ross Ulbricht. The author starts by saying something like, “My mother had an unusual way of reading books. She would read the end first, then go back and start from the beginning. She enjoyed piecing together how the story got from A to B.” I realized that spoilers have never bothered me, for the same reason.
Ooh, that’s not bad. I think I used to do something similar in highschool when looking at a book I was uncertain I had the willpower to finish. It definitely helped with Shogun.
So I guess the author of Kingpin was literally telling you to go straight to the end of Kingpin. I wonder which books I have sitting on my shelf now that this might help with
He was actually introducing the format of the book, i.e. it started with Ulbricht being arrested for running Silk Road, then jumped back to the beginning of the story. Of course it’s a common structure especially for nonfiction, but I enjoyed the meta-ness of it.
Interesting. I suppose I have seen that in film before but never in a book. Pretty cool though
I heard our brains aren’t made to handle this many choices. It’s easier to pick a movie when choosing between 3-5 options
Very. I dont think its boring or anything, just quite forgettable and i simply dont find it enjoyable enough to want to keep watching. Idk if thats a me problem though since I dont inherently look through lists or whats trending because Im not motivated enough for that either but if I do want a good movie to watch I ask some of my film buff friends for recommendations, while they do give the occasional stinker (to me at least since our tastes are different) the recommendations are very solid can legit be hidden gems that very niche and slip under the radar for a lot of people. Wouldnt have it any other way.
Find more cool underground stuff instead of pop slop (i just made that up and I like that term now)
If something interests me I add it to the list. Not overly concerned with critical opinion if its negative.
Sometimes I will seek other things based on enjoying something. So an actor or director’s other works for example.
Talking to people and finding out what they enjoy and then evaluating whether or not it is interesting to you is a good way to isolate something. For example KPop Demon Hunters looked like slop to me (and I enjoy some Korean media), but someone at work started talking about it and that got me just interested enough to take a look into it and them watch and subsequently enjoy it.
I have a hard time watching new movies and shows. I guess I usually look for a show to unwind with, and nostalgia is a pretty strong factor there.
If I’m watching a new show with somebody because they want to see it, I’ll generally enjoy myself. But lately I find that I’m pretty quick to reject anything made after 2020 or so
Another way I look at it is that there’s an awful lot of crap competing for my attention, and with the rise of gen-AI, writing for streaming, and other icky things, a lot of it really is crap. I’d rather watch the crap I already know I like
I’d rather watch the crap I already know I like
Same, tho I do catch a bit of shit from the gf “sigh This again?”
Meanwhile, I’ll hear her listen to the same song 5x from down the hall
Yeah i have very specific interests,
Grounded acifi mostly.
The expanse top tier could done without the portal etc
Firefly
Killjoys
Then old westerns
Some modern westerns
And that’s about it.
I’ll dabble in other genres but normally only if someone else says it’s worth it
Oye, beltalowda!
Any old westerns you’d like to recommend? I’ve been watching a lot of 70s era and earlier movies lately, seems like I’ll stumble into the golden age of westerns sooner or later
For a more modern show (geez, 15 years old already) I really enjoyed Hell on Wheels
The good the bad the ugly is a classic
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is another great.
3:10 to Yuma the original. The new one is good too.
Many others i cant remember off the top of my head.
Very picky. I don’t have time for duds.
The tried-and-true method is to get recommendations from people you trust. Or even algorithms you trust.
“The 100 best movies” will be mostly generic with a small amount of rage-bait. If that’s boring to you, then find some less generic resources. https://www.allmovie.com/advanced-search can be useful for films. You can throw some pretty weird search criteria at it and find more off-the-wall stuff.
Starting from something you know you like and looking at the “other people liked…” section is never going to be 100% reliable but better than nothing.
Worse than anything is scrolling through Netflix. They purposefully make their descriptions beyond garbage-tier. Presumably they think that means people will just pick whatever slop is put in front of them and then… turn it off again? I dunno, maybe they want to be able to aggressively cut that new show after two seasons without biasing people’s expectations with a useful description. This is now just a rant about how useless Netflix is.
I take other people’s recommendations. From people I know share my tastes.
That depends entirely on what each person finds entertaining, and even then I bet there’s a bunch of people that would argue that some of those top 100 movies aren’t entertainment but culture.
Nothing wrong with not liking a movie or show even before watching it but I would recommend to give them a chance from time to time just in case, you never know. This is something I miss from old linear TV, to have stuff already on that you started watching out of boredom because there wasn’t anything good on and then realising that it was more interesting than expected.To find those movies or shows boring it’s not being picky. For me picky would be for example to only watch movies if certain people are in it.
