Hacker Cinema
Baymax!
2022 · TV series · 12 min episodes · 1 season
Return to the fantastical city of San Fransokyo where the affable, inflatable, inimitable healthcare companion robot, Baymax, sets out to do what he was programmed to do: help others.
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2 comments on Hacker News
One notable recent thing that stood out to me is that the kids' show Baymax! had an episode where the plot was that a 12-year-old girl needed help shopping for menstrual hygiene products and got recommendations on what was most comfortable from a transgender man. Which is likely to be very confusing for most kids to say the least and was clearly added to score political points, not to make a better show.
I'm a movie lover, though I do find that the majority of films I see are forgettable and I never want to see them again. Still, I enjoy watching them anyway, and every now and then a movie will blow you away. But I think the human mind can only handle so much information, so it's almost impossible to avoid at least some level of generalizing large loads of films into mind's deserts of blandness. (And this goes for just about everything that humans can consume in large number; memories of days at the office, people's faces, etc.) We might blame a particular movie for not being special enough to stand out, but that also depends on our ability to compare it with large swaths of experience.
> TV and Film have switched spots
I don't think they've really switched. The advent of streaming has let many TV programs tell longer narratives across multiple episodes, which some filmmakers may prefer to the time limits of a film, but that extra expanse of time can be both a strength and a weakness.
> You Learn the Tricks
While this does make some films more predictable, learning the tricks has actually made me enjoy watching them more. I'm interested to see how they use common patterns and tricks, and I like finding patterns and tropes myself that change how I think of story structures. For example, midpoints tend to include a shift in location, or the "unnatural" character tends to sacrafice himself at movie's end (Groot, Baymax, ET). It's like learning a language. Yes, perhaps 95% of what people say with it will be boring and predictable, but there are seemingly infinite little variations, and the language becomes interesting in itself.
You'll also notice how different directors, actors, composers, cinematographers, screenwriters, etc. have their own sorts of style, and how those styles develop over the years. Obvious examples would be Terrence Malick's wide-angle wandering, Christopher Nolan's cross-cutting tension crescendoes, Carol Reed's wet cobblestones and dutch angles, Sergio Leone's eye closeups, Scorsese's overhead "God's POV" shots, etc.
> Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad ... Film is passive by definition, because it's best when you're fully immersed.
So... film is best when it's fundamentally bad? Maybe don't consume it passively? I enjoy looking for patterns, I enjoy thinking of story possibilities, I enjoy laughing at how stupid a movie or its characters might be, I enjoy trying to understand why a film doesn't work for me and how I might fix it if I could, etc. Sometimes a movie sucks me in and I just enjoy the ride the whole way through, I guess that's being "fully immersed", but that's rare, and when it doesn't happen I don't try to force it. Of course you'll grow bored of movies if you try to force that all the time.
> Thus comes the slow disappointment of watching movies. First you don’t understand them. Then you understand them, and they’re captivating. Then you understand them too well, and they’re boring. ... Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience.
I agree with this, and yet I want to watch more movies. Yes, most of them are boring by themselves (like all experiences), but there's still plenty to explore in their relations to other works, all the creative decisions that went into them, etc. And, yes, the movies that blow you away are exceedingly rare, but, for me at least, completely worth the treasure hunt.