Comment by technothrasher
14 hours ago
> interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
The few film studies classes I took in high school and college taught me so much about the hows and whys of film, that I can't possibly now watch a sequence like that and think "just someone walking through a dark environment". So much going on in those scenes that you'll miss if you're not interested in looking. That's not to say that everyone will be interested in, say, how the scene is framed, choice of camera focus and depth of field, where the lighting is coming from, or where the characters placed in relation to each other, but it's all there to observe and enjoy if you like it.
That's why I'm "pro-boredom," in a sense. If you let yourself dismiss a scene when you're not enjoying it, you may never discover what's enjoyable about it. Putting in the work of paying attention pays dividends. Of course, sometimes it yields nothing, but that's why you need to get good at it. If paying attention to something boring feels like pulling teeth, you'll never do it, and you'll miss a lot of great stuff.
And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.
How about all those movies where the critical consensus is that it's overlong and needed to be tightened? That the mediocre 2:10 movie could have made for a great 1:40 movie?
Directors aren't infallible. They frequently make movies that are too long. Making the most of my two hours sometimes requires playing some of the overlong parts at 2x speed, because they often don't pay dividends at all. It has nothing to do with "putting in the work of paying attention", it's just not worth it.