Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

> There's huge overuse shallow depth of field

I've ranted about this so much to friends, it's so distracting to me.

I have the hypothesis that some of it is due to how easy (or easier?) it is to quickly review footage to tell if the focus is set right when it's so aggressively shallow, but regardless of the "why" the monotony of it drives me crazy.

I want to see the environments the characters are in, I want the visceral grounding of the feel of that environment. I watched "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and it felt so primal, and watching how intentional the sound design alone is I can see why.

> In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters.

That's a great description about the strange disembodiment I've felt in modern shows for a while now.

> The original post was about how he was angry that his friend was messing around with his phone during a movie. Why does this bother him? He feels his friend was not respecting the integrity of art, that he is missing important things in life, that meaning and value is lost as his friend treats his screen time as a flood of dopamine.

I love how you ask why this bothers me (a woman btw, your reading comprehension seems shaky) and then go on to explain perfectly why this bothers me. I think "missing important things in life" is a bit strong phrasing, I would say: you're missing a lot of the emotional value the art you're consuming has by way of consuming too much at once to beat dopamine out of your brain vs. having a genuine, personal experience with an art object. But this is solely a situation where you're harming your own experience, not me.

The only sense it would really bother me is that I would throw a soda at you if you were watching instagram reels in a theater.

> What I was trying to tell him (really just talking into the social media void) is that it's all meaningless anyway. When you're young you care, but as you mature, that feeling of the perfectness of your screen time becomes a childish thing. It is much like the difference between two lousy fast food burgers, the metaphor he partially understood but reduced to "they are both lousy" which wasn't my point.

I mean I still don't really understand your point. If you divide your attention, you have a less cognizant experience of... anything. If you text while driving, your odds of getting in a car wreck go up astronomically.

If anything as you get older, you should learn to slow down and do one thing at a time, because your attention span gets weaker as your cognitive abilities decline.

> But his behavior was a little too immature for me, with the brinksmanship and oh-so-daring insults to my intelligence

I didn't insult you. I said you were being insufferable and you were. You're absolutely right, I didn't understand your point, and I seem to be far from alone in that. So I asked you to explain it, and you acted like I was an idiot for not parsing your word salad correctly.

> so I probably got sidetracked in my response and it wasn't very good.

Yeah maybe just answer the question next time.

Modern movies aren't allowed breathing room. Watch something from the 70s versus now. We absolutely blast people with dialogue and spoon feed action sequences. Older movies has silence in moments. Casual conversation. People weren't trying to pack in maximum information through close up monologues disguised as dialogue.

You weren't making sense well before any alleged insults to your intelligence

And having made your "point" more clear, I'm tempted to actually do so myself