A part of me wishes I was into movies, as there are loads that I do actually want to watch like The Thing, The Predator, or the first two (three?) movies of The Alien franchise. I suppose a reason I'm not into movies is because I don't understand the joy of just sitting there and watching the story unfold on the screen. So, for anyone into movies -- what compels you? What is it about movies that makes you want to go to them?
Movies are another form of storytelling (I love all storytelling). I got really into screenwriting before I got into prose fiction so I've always been interested in film. The filmmaking process is a fascinating one to me. So many people are involved to make it happen and I love the behind-the-scenes of films and television. When all of the elements (writing, directing, acting, cinematography, music, etc) mesh and work well together, it's quite magical. Great movies or television, in my opinion, are much more than "just sitting there and watching the story unfold" just as a great novel would be much more than just sitting there and reading words. But to each their own. I'm certainly not trying to convince you to like movies. Do you enjoy theatre?
I think this stems to my hearing disability. I was never able to enjoy going to the movies as what they were saying was barely audible for me. It was just a messy jumble of words -- here's an example: Davey Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean: "...Did he now? I'm sorely tempted to accept that offer." Me Hearing That: "Did he...tempted...offer."
Largely that fact that I'm a couch potato. I go through ~2.5L olive oil a month, and easily half that is from batches of popcorn (the missus helps but only eats a fraction of what I do). Disgusting, right? Should be at least 4L... Anyway, it's the emotion for me. Movies can pack a big hit to the feels in a lot less time than it would take a novel. I also enjoy them because I have no desire to make one myself. With everything else, I'm always thinking: I want to do that. But movies? Nay, no desire at all. All the synapses are on 'guess the plot' and 'name that actor' detail. Lastly, films are especially important these days where everything is designed to consume as much of one's time as possible. Watch these series on a streaming platform, collect all this shit in that game, read the new fantasy anthology, spend hours moping across Youtube/social media/writing forums, etc... It's weird, but what used to be a large, 2 hour commitment in a day has actually become the least of a time glorp. You mentioned some horror movies you want to see. Hopefully you'll enjoy those, but it's not strange or anything if you don't like them.
Ah. I can see how that would kill the experience. Honestly, I don't go to the movies much anymore except for date nights. The Revenant was the last time I really wanted to see a movie as soon as it came out. Huge TVs are cheap now and there are a billion ways to stream. Do you have the same issue at home if you wore headphones?
Oh, maybe he was. But all the movies mentioned above won't be found in theaters now, and definitely can be watched with subtitles. I also have some trouble hearing some of what's said, and lately I've taken to frequently watching that way, though it's always been movies I already know well, but there are parts where I never understood what was being said. I find finally getting all the dialogue can clear things up nicely. For instance, I always wondered why in Aliens Ripley said she wanted to "nuke the site for morbid". I thought it was some special Marine term meaning until everything is dead. Turns out it was "from orbit"! Oh, well that's totally different!! I've been having a lot of these revelations recently. But watching with subtitles on the first time would be different, because you'd miss a lot of the visuals while you're reading.
Idea—watch the first time with subs on, and if you like the movie, watch it later without. You know if you like a movie you'll see it several times.
I don't watch many movies anymore, because I'm, reluctant to invest the time and whatever else each one demands: suspension of disbelief, emotional involvement, interest in a sport, curiosity about gambling casinos, a high tolerance for badly-lit blue metal surfaces. Also, lately, the music is so damn loud you can't hear what anyone's saying - even the narrator in a documentary. The thing about a movie is: it's a one-off - the whole book in less than two hours. (Or, it's supposed to be. These yet-another franchise things are a crashing bore!) You watch it once, cry or swear or cheer or call your estranged father, and it's over. It doesn't ask you to tune in again next week or phone next day. No commitment.
It's the stuff that dreams are made of. but then I like the classics. I'm finding new movies unbearable (the stuff that nightmares are made of) The stars are boring. The techniques so hopelessly recycled from independent movies that we're tricked into thinking the movie is deep because there's lots of pauses, a deep focus on a random object and stoic actors. And big epic music. Oh, and all heroes must wear a cape, a special suit, have special powers or be brooding loser antiheros - where's our everyday Jimmy Stewart? Where's our everyday Jean Arthur? Where's the glamour? They've lost the reason why we watched them in the first place - they used to be the dream types.
I love the theater experience: the music (this is very big for me), the dark, the cameraderie (sort of) of being part of an audience. And if the movie was good, then $10 dollars wasn't too much to spend for a couple hours of happiness. Make sure to stop at Walmart for snacks I'm not really interested in a lot of the movies that come out, though. I have great respect for the MCU, but they're just superhero movies at the end of the day. Ford vs. Ferrari was great. I agree, but I think if they came out with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington nowadays it wouldn't be very popular, unfortunately. Edit: I'm thinking of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly right now which is my favorite film, and I'm realizing that there's no way it could have been translated into a book without losing the essence. Clint Eastwood standing with his cigarillo and squinting is one of the most badass images in cinema for me, but I think that in a novel it would have gotten too introspective, or else would have had much less power. The characters come to life literally in a movie. That standoff scene at the end, with Angel Eyes and Blondie and Tuco staring each other down could never have had the impact in a novel. That story is uniquely cinematic.
I think they got lost in special-effects and awesome sets and props. Too much technology, not enough story-telling.
@Friedrich Kugelschreiber Today's theater audiences ruin it though—loud, rude, and constantly talking to each other or on their cell phones. At least 'round these parts.
Well, it's not as if the movie houses were conducive to 'the experience'. I saw War of the Worlds (in Thechnicolor!!) in 1958 at The Victory on Spadina Av., which looked and smelled like a theater. It was an experience. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at the University on Bloor St. The theater was still magnificent in 1981 - gone a couple of years later. It was an adventure. I took a friend to see The Gods Must Be Crazy, the second time it came around, because i had loved it the first time, in a crappy little cement box of a Cineplex where the too-loud soundtrack echoed off the too-close walls. It was a miserable disappointment. I haven't gone out and paid $16 or whatever they charge now to see a movie since. DVD's work ok
Lots of movies are! That's what was so great about ET, Raiders, The Third Man, The Birds... It's a whole other medium, and the artists who know how to use it create a whole other kind of experience. But, since the venue for enlarging that experience no longer exists, we can appreciate it on a smaller screen at home.
I very rarely see movies in the theater. I'm very uncomfortable around crowds. I also prefer being in the comfort of my home so I can experience emotions without being judged by people going past. Passed? Past. I'm having a moment, pardon me. Not to bring it up again, but I'm gonna. When I saw 1917 for the first time, I ugly sobbed in my car for twenty minutes afterward. I wasn't prepared for how intense of an experience it was. Even now after I've seen it a few times, I cry because I go on the journey with the characters. I'm fairly unimpressed by films these days. My family and a lot of people raved about Knives Out, and rightly so because it's fairly decent, but I don't think I saw the same movie they did. I figured it out with the introduction of the person who did it. I didn't know how they'd done it, but yeah. It's interesting because I can binge watch the entire season of Kingdom on Netflix in one evening, but I get bored with movies pretty regularly. Who knows? Maybe I'm just crochety.
Good entertainment of the audio-visual variety is pretty much moving from Hollywood to cable and Netflix these days. Hollywood is too bloated and dollar-obsessed, but the smaller newer studios aren't loaded down with the same massive business model, and it's pulling in the best writers and directors.
Immersion and action, theatre. All else, read the book. If it's good. Haven't read a book or watched a new movie in more than a decade and haven't missed anything, apparently. Used to rewatch DVDs, meh. Immersion. Take me away. Thirty years of fascinating documentaries has revealed the origin of most modern movie attempts. Can't get immersed in today's inane reality rom-com recycled two-year cycle. Don't hype-sell me! Take me away! Immersion. Put me in the story. Isn't VR already supposed to that? It worked for thousands of years before. We are theatre! Try that.
Some things can be only be conveyed through the medium of film. Examples are attached. Might be NSFW/spoilers included. In short: the element of sound.
I love the movies. Back when I still lived in the states I would go see a movie every Sunday night, and I actually prefer seeing movies in the theater by myself than with a friend/date/spouse. When I'm in the theater alone (excepting the other patrons) I'm free to enjoy things without any concern about how my fellow viewer feels. It's almost like reading a book, it's a private experience. And while I love to read, there are some things that simply cannot be conveyed as well on the printed page. I took an acting class when I was young, and we did an activity where we would pull an action out of one hat (lacing up your shoes) and a means of showing it from another (with your hands). It was designed to teach you to act with your whole body, to get rid of the woodenness that unskilled actors so frequently display when they focus too strongly on one point of the scene. The above example is an easy one, but if you'd had to do the scene with your eyes, or your mouth, it would force you to think about how you would naturally look when doing this commonplace task. Now take Meet Joe Black. Anthony Hopkins is one of our greatest living actors and I think that he didn't have to play too far from home in this movie. I think that Brad Pitt is (or was, he's kind of slipping these days IMO) a very talented actor, and Claire Forlani was no slouch here either. And their eyes are all the same shade of blue. And this movie is so much about acting with the eyes. The example of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly appears above, but that was one (brilliant climactic) scene. Watch Joe Black again and focus on the eyes. Focus on how Susan reads Joe's face and soul through the film. Focus on the wonder in Joe's eyes when he discovers peanut butter. And sex. Focus on how Bill dominates the room with his gaze over and over until the moment when Joe reminds him that he is "not some ordinary suitor." And the weakness and insecurity in Quince's gaze, the constant questioning. That movie is a masterpiece with brilliant casting, but there are other examples of how the screen can, in the right places, surpass the printed page.
I haven't actually gone to the movies in forever. My culture is one that talks loudly at the screen, happily accepts and makes both phone calls and texts on their immensely bright phablets during the movie, and I don't think I would enjoy prison, so... Big TV at home instead for moi. Why do I like films? I am a visual creature, as are humans in general. One only needs to look at the quality of camera lens eye we use and the size of our cerebral visual centers to know that like the rest of our great ape cousins, we are seeing creatures more than hearing, smelling, tasting or touching creatures. The medium finds most of its strength in the ability to visually deploy things we labour to describe in words. A surprised smirk, a glance out of the corner of one's eye, a look of abject horror. How many stories have you read that belabor these observations, spending whole paragraphs on them, never capturing them. Most of these gestures, glances, looks, and differing modes of engagement are situational and do not possess names, no matter how often people come to these venues and beg us to tell them "you know that one look you make when you bite into a fruit and think it's an apple, but actually it's a pear and you didn't want a pear, what's the name of that look?" There isn't one. But in a film, there doesn't have to be one. Someone mentioned the ALIEN franchise upthread, oh look, it was @Xoic. Why am I not surprised? In that film, Veronica Cartwright as Lambert delivers one of the most disturbing, violent death-screams in cinematic history when the xenomorph does her in. It's made all the more horrific by having an incongruously sexual side to it. It's soul-rendering. And no configuration of words printed in dead ink could ever do it justice. ETA: And it goes the other way too. I am looking very much forward to the new iteration of DUNE, but I am heading into it with caution. I genuinely do not think DUNE is a book that can ever successfully transfer to the screen. So much of that story takes place inside the characters. It's a story made of thoughts, musings, and ruminations that are never given voice as much as it is made of actions and happenstances we can see on film. The same thing feels true of VanderMeer's Southern Reach novels that were made into the film Annihilation. The film is visually gorgeous, but it only manages to capture the visual appearance of Area X. Everything else happening with the characters is mostly lost, and all of the deeper symbolism is eradicated and sterilized from the film version because again, like DUNE, this all lives inside the book version of the characters.
