[GranteedEV]

While to some extent, a lot of the best movies I've ever watched were from the mid 2000s (V for Vendetta, Kill Bill, Shutter Island, The Dark Knight, Return of the King, Inception, Interstellar, 500 days of summer, and Brokeback Mountain come to mind as some of my favez), I actually reject the idea that filmmaking his declined.

Here are the things I would say have changed on the ~1.5 decades since The Dark Knight dropped:

- my transition into adulthood. I don't go to the movies with my group of friends anymore. I don't dream of asking my crush to x movie. The reality is, movies are no longer the default thing to do, they're a thing to do. If we're invested in a series, for instance the MCU, we might still make time for them, but then we have to go online and hear about how much people hate superhero movies, even though Infinity War / Endgame were probably two of the best experiences of the last decade. You're treated like a pleb for enjoying them because they have CGI or one-liners.

- the availability of things to do. I can pull out my phone and search for creative activities on the spot. Fifteen years ago most places to hang out did not even have a website or google review.

- this is the big one to me, but the limitation of the feature film format makes movies feel like a waste of time. I don't want to wade through 9 mediocre movies to find one subtitled masterpiece from the Cannes Film Festival. It's tedious. Movies are rarely long enough to create poignancy, because the intermission does not exist. Even "long" movies tend to be long because of directors self-indulging on action sequences due to massive budgets, not because the contents were meant to be long. How often do we leave a movie and say "yeah... okay... that was fun.. but couldn't they have added another fourty minutes to actually pad out the plot" or "yeah... okah... that was boring... I liked some parts but i wish x or y scene did not drag" or "they cut x or y scene from the book... totally changed the tone and meaning of that scene!"

that is the reality with movies... unless executed to perfection, they are not the right length for what they are trying to convey. They NEVER have been. Not in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s. But prior to the 00s they were the only "serious" medium to watch something. And then the HBO and Streaming happened. Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, The Americans, Breaking Bad, Sherlock, The first four seasons of Game of Thrones before it deviated from the books, Agents of Shield Seasons 2-5, Queen's Gambit, Doom Patrol, True Detective ... the list really goes on forever. We saw what could be done in fiction that wasn't necessarily needing extended action scenes to be rivetting, yet wasn't limited by an arbitrary 97 minute decree that wasn't even remotely sufficient to really tell an overarching plot worthy of its writers' vision.

The Golden Age of TV is why movies have lost their lustre. Novels can actually be adapted without lost detail. Original works don't need A-list celebrities/directors to be massive hits. There's still a lot of trash out there, but at least if something is good, I can spent four straight weekends binging it, instead of just a fleeting friday evening. Even if I waded through nine uninteresting first episodes, the pauoff four that tenth first episode exuding quality is orders of magnitude more worthwhile.