tv or movies

how cynical and rong is this? i mean, apply this to Taxi

how long were episodes of taxi? how much time did they have to make new episodes? that's all I meant.

ernest dickerson and agnieszka holland directed several episodes of the wire (which most certainly had some "cinematic" style). neither is ingmar bergman or martin scorsese, but juice and europaaa, europa were solid movies!

Newer digital TVs with a good sound system kind of makes going to a theatre not as big as big a deal as it once was.

I love seeing things in cinemas because it can be so joyous to surrender to being part of ~an audience~

I hear the director of Bridesmaids is thinking about doing some slumming in tv yo

I heard that about the star, too.

want to cosign lamp's points abt movies doing imagery etc better and tv doing plot, character etc better.

Why this could ever be a point in favour of movies escapes me.

bridesmaids is tv xxpost

(oh and stupid thread)

(but movies obv.)

also there is no golden silent era of television

films every time. i've never fully been able to get into tv as a regular thing (wasn't brought up in a tv-heavy household, living in a few houses with no tv at all completely weaned me off the habit). i actively resent it when tv is default "background noise" in a house.

i'm kind of all-or-nothing when it comes to getting into things, and tv series aren't very conducive to that. remembering to be around for it every week is a massive commitment! and the minute i miss an episode that's it, have to stop completely. last time i tried to do this was the lost/desperate housewives era and i didn't even make it to the end of the first series.

which leads into the most important point to me - films = socialising for me. you go out to the cinema, meet friends, maybe go for a meal or a drink, you talk about it afterwards. tv = a block on socialising. instead of going out you have to stay in at the same time every week.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Lex have you heard of VCR, Sky+, Tivo, iPlayer even? Totally removes the need to be in a room at the moment something is broadcast.

VCR - never could work out how to record on videos
sky+ - haha I haven't heard of this
tivo - didn't think we had this in the UK?
iplayer - oh god this just makes me too lackadaisical about catching up and then when i finally get round to it the programme's been taken off iplayer the day before. EVERY TIME.

bear in mind i genuinely struggle with, like, turning the tv on and changing the channel

the absence of time constraint for TV means even the best shows just blather along until they stop being profitable, plot - not that i'm a big fan of plot but still - is just a structuralist sausage machine now designed to keep the show junkies strung along as long as poss

Twin Peaks kinda foresaw, satirised, then invented this method

and if that's yr bag fine, whatever, but i have other time-murdering habits to sustain like video games kthx

goddamn threads are long these days

i got up to this part:

I am sure there were at least 20 movies I didn't see this year that I would have enjoyed very much, it's hard to figure out which 20 those would be, but still

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; there is a huge failure to push these things up into anyone's consciousness even though the internet is supposed to make distribution and associated "conversation" smooth as butter

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

i feel more or less the opposite re: tv

but then i feel like most drama series are written by fanboys and slash authors now and again i just can't be bothered to engage - season-long plot arcs and never-solved "mysteries" that are made up as they go along, whole thing really designed for DVD buyers rather than an audience that might wanna casually watch the odd ep of something if they happen to be in that evening

shdn't be on this ting hungover i'm just gonna go full mental about the evil that is 21st century tv

i hear that. to bring it back to videogames again there is maybe a need for the "pick up and play" model to have a renaissance, for us casual viewers

re: time-wasting, even if it's some horrible shit on TV like "i'm a celebrity get me out of here" i feel like i'm connecting up with the unseen millions out there who have also seen it, or are seeing it; particularly if some of those unseen millions actually LIKE IT (which some of them must) i feel like i'm getting some purchase on their mentality, which feels socially useful - and curiously i don't have this feeling of socially useful communion with videogames, even online multiplayer games

i get no sense of social usefulness from video games really but a deep brain-tickling pleasure, whereas i don't get much sense of social engagement from tv either but i feel like i'm slaughtering hecatombs of precious time. i'm purely talking from my own perspective here tho, i've got no judgement on people who love their tv, if i was of a mind to smoke weed nowadays i'd probly suck up a lot more tv than i do

live sport is the most tv i watch, tbph, i'm taking 'tv' as dvd boxsets and d/l series, i'm assuming everyone is too?

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; there is a huge failure to push these things up into anyone's consciousness even though the internet is supposed to make distribution and associated "conversation" smooth as butter

― his venerable escutcheon, Tuesday, 13 December 2011 11:05 (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

this is interesting - do you mean there's no canon for arcane stuff, outside of individuals enthusiasm? bc i think that's kinda true. i think it is harder to embrace things that are imperfect in a climate where there's such a voluble conversation about the 'best' things, so repping for some kind of idiosyncratic if nobly failing personal work is hard to get traction for.

i think there might come a point where seasons of television are released all at once rather than week-by-week, which would make tv dramas more novelistic in scope and cinematic in presentation.

― zachylon, Tuesday, December 13, 2011 1:11 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

why would this business model ever make sense

boxsets

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