<story><title>Visualization: Movies Are Getting Worse</title><url>http://moki.tv/blog/visual-evidence-movies-are-getting-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Interesting.  I&apos;d just been thinking about this.  The last two new releases I tried watching were so bad that I couldn&apos;t finish either of them.  I know this is only 2 data points, but they were both bad in the same way: they were completely predictable.  That&apos;s something you commonly see in a declining medium. People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>How much of this is a failure of the medium, though, rather than of individuals&apos; jaded palates coupled with the availability of almost all hit movies from the past for instant home viewing? We tend to glamorize earlier generations of the movie industry because some of their products have stood the test of time so well, while overlooking the abundance of terrible films that came out around the same time.&lt;p&gt;I do think that plotting, which is only one element of a film, tends to get more predictable as viewers age. There are only so many basic dramatic situations, and nowadays genre tropes are so well-defined and well-known that almost anything is going to look familiar and derivative to somebody, and be blogged about in such terms. On the other hand, a good film can be enjoyed repeatedly, despite the element of surprise being gone after the first viewing; the pleasure is in the quality of the execution rather than in the novelty of the story development.</text></comment>
<story><title>Visualization: Movies Are Getting Worse</title><url>http://moki.tv/blog/visual-evidence-movies-are-getting-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Interesting.  I&apos;d just been thinking about this.  The last two new releases I tried watching were so bad that I couldn&apos;t finish either of them.  I know this is only 2 data points, but they were both bad in the same way: they were completely predictable.  That&apos;s something you commonly see in a declining medium. People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>larrik</author><text>I find most movies to be predictable. &quot;Hero&apos;s Journey&quot; and all that. But I assume you mean less structural, and more like knowing exactly what they are going to say (or what jokes they&apos;ll use for a situation). I hate that.&lt;p&gt;But still, movies are (generally) business first, and art second. They don&apos;t even want to be &quot;new&quot;... just &quot;fresh&quot;.</text></comment>