tv or movies

what does 'modern novels are abt as bad as modern movies' mean

proportionally about as likely to make you feel/think something amazing

which isn't really true, novels are better than movies in that sense. i don't really want to drag novels/poetry into this tbh

i liked middlemarch

sorry it just seemed similar to me. the thing people say about novels is that they're character driven but baggy and imperfect and poetry is about the pure beauty of language or whatever. that argument is annoying.

xp <3

by "people" i basically mean "this one professor"

novels are also stuff girls like/write, whereas poetry is the important stuff dudes like/write

obviously that's not actually true it's just the stuff that creeps into the argument

stuff

i actually kind of agree that movies are theoretically better at being beautiful and perfect than tv shows but i honestly can't remember the last time i saw a movie that was actually beautiful or perfect

― n/a, Monday, December 12, 2011 9:49 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

yeah this is how i feel.

i also think its interesting the way both are/were (pre internet/vhs/whatever) communal experiences, but in different ways. tv shows and the water cooler and movies and everybody alone together in the dark. i mean i'm drawn more to that, the dark room, the whirring projector, the laughter or sobbing or gasps of the rest of the audience kindof piercing into the isolation of the cinemagoer. the way tv shows force you to stay with them to keep coming back, they pull on your time, whereas a movie burrows into your brain in a different way. its singular maybe because its a single thing. i think of that shot in texas chainsaw massacre where hes spinning around with his chainsaw or the red coat in don't look now or i'm not sure, but just the way the images burn without needing to increasingly reveal themselves.

man we need to get some mcluhan in here

voted movies, if you want a long and engaging story w/ a complex plot and multidimensional characters go read a book

peace

TV would be my answer for most of the reasons already mentioned and also because I really love good comedy - most of the good stuff is on TV; there is very rarely a truly funny movie out, for whatever reason. I find a lot of incidental everyday stuff funny (Peep Show, etc) which would not suit the movie format.

the everyday world is also all around you though i mean

like right there

and also over there

eh mcluhan

also with tv you can pretend it's going to go on forever and conquer death etc.

also ad breaks

well most movies arent art really but at least a couple a year seem to manage it

"a couple," or 40 or 50 I saw this year

(that admittedly mostly don't play in huge swaths of America, but u know discs/downloads etc)

u would consider 40-50 movies from this last year "art"?

it could be so. i don't know if i've ever even seen that many new movies in the year. seems like a huge number tho

I'd say about 600 feature films were exhibited for a week or more in NYC this year.

for sure, but that means that something like 6% of movies are art

film as an art form exists outside of those 600 feature films

tv does not exist outside of tv

tho it can be show outside of tv

I think it can be summed up like this for me: I love my favorite movies more than I love most good TV series (w/probably the exception of, like, Larry Sanders or Kids In The Hall...which, incidentally, I remember Morbs also adoring!), but I think there might be more television that I love than movies that I love. And I daresay that the television I love has been far more impactful on a number of levels.

i stuck a noodle up my nose

tv's got the bewbs

lol aspie rube shut-ins

for sure, but that means that something like 6% of movies are art

Do you really think TV can claim a better average?

(For the record I think of the best of both mediums as essential, w/ different strengths.)

tv = less letters so it wins

I think the problem w/ sustainednarrative tv is that there are usually so many writers involved that someone ends up fucking it up along the way, it's a lot easier for a movie to be perfect than a tv series

not all shows work like this, not all shows have to work like this. actually can you clarify that you're not assuming that a show's story is tossed around from one writer to the next episode by episode without any leadership or communication, cause i'm not sure

serialized television getting better will happen as long as shows keep getting more centralized leadership from talented writers (ie louie, the semi-auteurs of HBO). but having a room filled with talented writers backing the author up and providing salient perspectives and filling in the empty spaces and writing glorious dialogue where the author might be better at story = potential greater than most glorious films. rarely reached tho

also wtf, why is television less capable of achieving moments of beauty? it has happened much less with television but it's a young and slowly growing medium

no it's not

and i agree that tv isn't in a renaissance at all, ppl just have too low expectations for it. if breaking bad is the best drama on television we're definitely not in a renaissance. i think tv has to outgrow its current format fully for that to happen

tv will not outgrow its current format it will just stop being ""tv"" and start being media that gets put on the internet in various formats

iatee can you try explaining why television is inherently incapable of cinematic-level beauty

it's not inherently incapable it's just even less likely due to the way it makes $

xp so why exactly will internetized tv fail to continue growing? piracy?

ya i agree, but the way it makes $ is evolving

piracy, long-term problems w/ making money through traditional tv commercials, people being increasingly unwilling to pay for cable due to the way we consume media

movies are pirated too, i don't think it's as damaging as you think it is. advertising doesn't need to be a part of tv's future -- premium cable networks are still getting by fine without it. i'm an optimist but i think tv will get a successful itunes treatment before it fails and dies. and subscriber cable will still support networks.

er, cable networks i mean. ABC and them will do what they do and not necessarily have a major impact on the evolution of cable.

hollywood will have problems too but people are willing to pay for 'the moviegoing experience', the 'tv experience' can be pirated. premium cable networks still depend on having a huge base of people w/ large cable packages who 'watch tv', I don't think that will exist in the same sense in 20 years.

I would love to see Louie become a more prevalent model for future shows. Made on the cheap by one central dude with complete creative control. I feel like we'll see a lot more of this as subscription fees for various services increasingly supplant advertising dollars (there's a pretty direct causal link explaining the disproportionately high level of quality of HBO's original programming, f'rinstance). That day can't come soon enough, by christ.

fwiw, i get more pleasure out of watching episodes of breaking bad and parks and recreation than i do out of watching most movies. 10 years ago, i would have said the same thing about the sopranos, 5 years before that i would've said the same thing about the x files and 5 years before that twin peaks and the early episodes of the simpsons. TV has gotten better over the past ten years, i agree, but even before that in the "dark ages" there were TV shows i liked way more than most movies ... so it's a long way of saying that yeah the tv renaissance is kinda overblown.

besides, even most good tv shows lose steam after the third season. it's cliche, but it's true and even more true nowadays.