Film students who can no longer sit through films

Often media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly.

For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours.

Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth.

So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?

This is just not true. My daughter, who finds school boring to the point of depression, has no problem spending hours reading the complete Akira manga in a foreign language. The crisis you are talking about is not in the people, but in the system.

It helped that books were all we had. I probably would have preferred little snippets of dopamine, too.

I'm kinda glad I walked across campus glued to a book. But it was the same low tolerance for boredom that people show today.

Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula.

I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time.

Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths.

"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.

From a programmer perspective:

(Old man yelling at the sky.)

It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).

I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.