tv or movies

schlump no i mean that there are an unbelievable number of great movies that get made every year that we will NEVER know about (to take just one of many reasons: the producer doesn't have enough money to subtitle it) whereas there is very little great TV that passes unnoticed

actually maybe that last bit's not true; there have been approximately one (1) metric fvckton of interesting-looking docs on BBC4 that i haven't watched, not to mention an incredible miniseries like "the promise" that i only saw because i randomly happened upon someone's tweet about it

by the way i watched "outnumbered" last night - cause it was on - and it was much worse than i had imagined

ahhhhhh ha ha ha ilx! you almost fooled me into caring about this.

anyway the answer is tv because it's more like books

schlump no i mean that there are an unbelievable number of great movies that get made every year that we will NEVER know about (to take just one of many reasons: the producer doesn't have enough money to subtitle it) whereas there is very little great TV that passes unnoticed

ah okay. i mean this just reminds me of life!, though. & is maybe a negative result of the generally positive democratisation of film, the opening up of film to people who aren't necessarily w/a studio, who can shoot digitally &c&c&c. but yeah obv this is true. but i have hope for this though. the internet has engendered a swing back to curatorial input, & to people being able to defer to experts' choices rather than just listen to the loudest voices; there are even those communities who'll subtitle the unsubtitled film for wider consumption. I think that there are going to be, somewhere, bbc4 programmers or Iranian film nerds doing some of the legwork is what we have to invest in, but i still think escaping the shadow of the canon is a big deal -- there is that guy writing a column for film comment about lost hollywood-era ""auteurs"" (prob not his term), arguing that a lot of the basic spadework hasn't been done in watching through & organising that stuff in postmortem

Poll Closing Date: Saturday, December 29, 2012

TV preferred by clowns who don't know what year it is.

How many of you watch TV and movies at home while doing other things, btw? cuz none of that counts.

the answer is tv because it's more like books

i do really like the way characters in a TV series live in your headspace for weeks or months

this is a big problem with great, say, iranian movies, or indie budget flicks - they are just not available, even on the pirate bay, much less reviewed or written about

100% RONG

well karagarga won't give me an invite

morbs i only watch tv while jacking off over dennis perrin tweets, i highly recommend

u might as well be ethan or someone just as boring

morbs i know there are a few specialist outlets that write about totally unobtanium films but i don't read them for the most part, why because i would have to be available at 2:30pm in new york city on a particular wednesday in order to see them and you know, i work for a living so the whole exercise would just make me cry with futility

sorta otm ^

another reason i'm giving TV the edge is that even the artiest shows have to be middlebrow to an extent, they have to straddle the line between art and product; like stand-up comedy they have to at least attempt to work on a functional level as entertainment regardless of whatever other artistic ambitions they have, whereas by my lights movies have been shoved towards opposite poles, either machine-tooled product or plangent meditation on postmodern subjectivity (or whatever)

guys lets start our own TV channel

cd call it F U Tube

another reason i'm giving TV the edge is that even the artiest shows have to be middlebrow to an extent, they have to straddle the line between art and product; like stand-up comedy they have to at least attempt to work on a functional level as entertainment regardless of whatever other artistic ambitions they have, whereas by my lights movies have been shoved towards opposite poles, either machine-tooled product or plangent meditation on postmodern subjectivity (or whatever)

i would hate to be arguing for art refusing to try to engage people, but i think in a world in which there are ~a bunch of other shows~, a bunch of other films, it's okay to have outliers & idiosyncratic shows/films. to invoke louis ck's efforts re: making louie, he was mad at the punch-up & grooming that was done to tv to make it broadly pleasing. cinema is doing god's work imo in plangently-meditating-on society

The majority of anti-TV peeps in this thread seem to dislike TV because they don't know how to do it right. Because I actually agree with a lot of their points (TV sucks if you just sit and passively watch it for 8 hours at a time, it sucks to be locked into a schedule of watching shows, it's hard to judge the quality of quality television when you haven't actively engaged with television in 5+ years, etc.). To me, this isn't that far off from someone saying that they hate movies because people are always getting shot in the theater they go to. Or that every time they get bored and go see some random movie they're always disappointed. There are different and better ways to enjoy it.

An hour of programming on ABC Family, for instance, is almost enough to make me wish that Western culture didn't exist.

Tv, by a lot. The only movies I like these day are big budget action/scifi flicks or documentaries.

The majority of anti-TV peeps in this thread seem to dislike TV because they don't know how to do it right. Because I actually agree with a lot of their points (TV sucks if you just sit and passively watch it for 8 hours at a time, it sucks to be locked into a schedule of watching shows, it's hard to judge the quality of quality television when you haven't actively engaged with television in 5+ years, etc.). To me, this isn't that far off from someone saying that they hate movies because people are always getting shot in the theater they go to. Or that every time they get bored and go see some random movie they're always disappointed. There are different and better ways to enjoy it.

I have never had a problem w/ gun violence at the theaters I go to fwiw

bringing a gun to a movie theater is pretty bad gun etiquette

speaking of video games, i love video games, but i have this weird feeling that i'm "wasting time" when i play them - even the very best games - which i almost never feel with TV or movies, even when they are terrible

didnt we have a long & p interesting thread abt this like a year or so ago on real ilx???

like stand-up comedy they have to at least attempt to work on a functional level as entertainment

Ingmar Bergman was an entertainer, and a good one.

why do we have to choose?

serious question.

agreed, morbius!

(i was talking broadly about current movies)

xxpost

You have to choose because we're going to shoot one of them in the street like a dog.

put movies out of their misery, and do it in 3-D smellovision

Jean-Luc Godard is an entertainer. He put a llama and a mule at a gas station in his latest film.

Best part is when the mule says to his friend "do you believe in god?" and the other animal nods and says "yes, I follow the dali llama."

damn those Navajo subtitles

And then the camera pans to a llama sporting an eccentric upturned mustache.

Anna Karina and Jean Paul Belmondo were told by Godard to put a mule in the barn. When they led the mule over to the barn, they decided that the mule's ears were to long and he would not fit into the barn. So they put their heads together and decided to get a ladder and a saw and saw the overhead of the barn out so the mule could walk right on in the barn.

They began their job and Godard walked over to them and asked them why they were sawing out the top of the barn. When they told him the mule's ears were too long to go into the barn, he said:

"Why don't you just get a shovel and dig the dirt out of the ground below, then the mule could walk on in"

Anna and Jean Paul looked at each other and said "We told you his ears were too long, not his feet."

The majority of anti-TV peeps in this thread seem to dislike TV because they don't know how to do it right. Because I actually agree with a lot of their points (TV sucks if you just sit and passively watch it for 8 hours at a time, it sucks to be locked into a schedule of watching shows, it's hard to judge the quality of quality television when you haven't actively engaged with television in 5+ years, etc.).

this is not it at all, at least for me. the simple fact is that the number of pleasurable viewing hours to be derived from movies (and I mean ALL movies going back to the dawn of film) is larger than the number of pleasurable viewing hours to be derived from TV (and I mean ALL of TV going back to the dawn of television). Some of this is attributable to the fact that so little TV bears re-watching - even the stuff that is pretty good (I never need to see an episode of Cheers, or MASH, or the Wire, or Happy Days ever again, for example). There are some exceptions (Simpsons, Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Twilight Zone, KITH, Mr. Show) but they're pretty rare.

This is not the case with films - decent films bear up under repeated viewing. And then there's the simple fact that the vast majority of TV is total shit. I simply think the hit:miss ratio for films is better.

don't understand why this thread got hung up on NEW TV shows and movies, that seems like a totally irrelevant and outdated way to assess viewing material in this day and age, when everything is available all the time.

SMC OTM --

voted movies, because I didn't assume n/a was talking about current tv and current movies in the OP

― William (C), Monday, December 12, 2011 5:15 PM (Yesterday)

this is a big problem with great, say, iranian movies, or indie budget flicks - they are just not available, even on the pirate bay, much less reviewed or written about

also yeah this is nonsense I can get this shit from my local video store

tbf you do live in iran

love this place - bros for all time and they're going to put in a screening room in their basement! awes

most people don't have hipster videostores nearby, including most people in sf or brooklyn

heaven forbid you should actually have to find a physical place, walk somewhere, and talk to an actual person to find a movie

you should print that out and post it on their window when they go out of business in 2 years

A major source of international films for me is the New York Public Library.

(I imagine other major cities' libraries stock many, many fewer)

including most people in sf

there's at least 4 throughout the city that I know of (Le Video and Lost Weekend are the best ones tho)

okay so I guess you should print out 4 copies

you should print that out and post it on their window when they go out of business in 2 years

people have been saying this for at least 5 years and not only are they still in business, they're expanding so whatever

anyway the point is these things are available if you are interested and willing to look for them on something that is not an internet service

don't understand why this thread got hung up on NEW TV shows and movies, that seems like a totally irrelevant and outdated way to assess viewing material in this day and age, when everything is available all the time

I totally get this. But I'm judging this silly poll in terms of "What brings the most pleasure to my life right now?"

hipster videostore economics aside, it's pretty easy to film relatively obscure films in 2011, 100x easier than it was in the 90s