Why Movies Suck ...
- Many talented tv writers have a spell writing a comparatively crappy movie first. Graham Yost put in a decent attempt with Speed, Aaron Sorkin with the American President, but Whedon has Alien:Resurrection in his past, and J.J. Abrams has Armageddon. Movies are usually just a stepping stone to television where you don't have to sell out your original vision.
- In a movie it usually takes 30 minutes to do something that would take 10 tops in a tv show.
- It's virtually impossible to produce a good sequel to a film. That means rarely can one good film idea produce more than two hours of entertainment. Yet a good tv show concept can go on being entertaining for many seasons, and even improve.
- Films rarely allow for long-term character arcs. There's hardly any pay-off, it's rare for you to actually engage with a single character in the short space of time they appear.
- The most successful films are usually Hollywood skewed pieces of rubbish that mostly consist of various set pieces strung together with a single weak storyline.
- Those films that don't comply to the above formula are usually artsy pieces of junk that are completely unintelligable unless you're willing to sit around nodding pretending you understand something.
I'm sure I can come up with many other reasons later, but that's my rant for now. It's astonishing that cinema can only produce a couple of things I even want to watch yet I've got a mass of tv DVDs and CDs that I watch all the time. It's also pretty damning that film is widely considered the leading medium of the entertainment industry yet it's so stagnant. A couple of years ago I'd have been lauding my praise on the gaming industry which discovered the ability to tell incredible storylines with things like Planescape:Torment, Deus Ex, and Baldur's Gate 2, but that seems to have sunk into stagnant self-decline.
- In a movie it usually takes 30 minutes to do something that would take 10 tops in a tv show.
- It's virtually impossible to produce a good sequel to a film. That means rarely can one good film idea produce more than two hours of entertainment. Yet a good tv show concept can go on being entertaining for many seasons, and even improve.
- Films rarely allow for long-term character arcs. There's hardly any pay-off, it's rare for you to actually engage with a single character in the short space of time they appear.
- The most successful films are usually Hollywood skewed pieces of rubbish that mostly consist of various set pieces strung together with a single weak storyline.
- Those films that don't comply to the above formula are usually artsy pieces of junk that are completely unintelligable unless you're willing to sit around nodding pretending you understand something.
I'm sure I can come up with many other reasons later, but that's my rant for now. It's astonishing that cinema can only produce a couple of things I even want to watch yet I've got a mass of tv DVDs and CDs that I watch all the time. It's also pretty damning that film is widely considered the leading medium of the entertainment industry yet it's so stagnant. A couple of years ago I'd have been lauding my praise on the gaming industry which discovered the ability to tell incredible storylines with things like Planescape:Torment, Deus Ex, and Baldur's Gate 2, but that seems to have sunk into stagnant self-decline.