Age & Storytelling

So I'm getting older every year.  In case you don't know, this happens to everyone.  Now since I've been a kid, I've been watching movies and TV shows religiously.  In terms of different professions, I surely could have been a movie/tv critic but trying really hard to find flaws into something and then blowing it out of proportion seems like a snobby job in my eyes.  I've only ever seen a few reviews and they bothered me, so of course I make the illogical conclusion of categorizing everyone based on 10 reviews that I read.  My point is that what I look for in stories seems to have changed. 

Lets start with the Avengers storyline, to ensure that I piss off 95% of people that love going to the movies.  Now before you point your finger and call me hippie douche that's going against the mainstream, trying to be different maaaaan, just hear me out.  I enjoy the movies, they're fun to watch once.  Then, I couldn't care less about them.  The stories are generic, there's few things that are really deep during the story and all villains fall on a scale from below average to terrible.  Characters are great and movies are fun.  You put this in contrast with Nolan's Batman trilogy that blows all of them out of the water other than Captain America 2 that's also up there.  CA2 is an exception to those movies and an amazing movie.  Go watch it if you haven't!

an interesting take on creativity by Steve Jobs

I think in the past, I would have enjoyed said movies a lot more.  Now, I seem to constantly look for stories that make you think, that make you talk about the movie or want to see the movie again and again.  Maybe again due to age or seeing so many storylines so many times, I find a lot of the stories recycled with a slightly different color.  Especially now that tv shows have completely overtaken movies as more engaging, taking more risks and the quality overall being much better, movies themselves aren't gravitating me as much as they did when I was such a young kid.  I think the lack of quality is part of the reason why an above average franchise like the Avengers is printing billions of dollars. (in my opinion, I think this should be obvious since it's blog).  Or the case me not being to accept that other people have different opinions and preferences than me.

Maybe due to age, we become more cynical as well, which might be partly a reason of my pessimistic view on the movie media.  Regardless, I think this may related as design, illustration and web.  We see so much, but for me, this gives us a chance to soak it all in like a sponge.  When we do so, we use the little things that we see from so many references to create our vision, that is different enough to stand on its own.  To me, advertising in particular has gotten better and better.  Commercials are far more engaging and better thought out, on top of all the intrusive ways companies find to tell or sell us a product via a cellphone, table and/or computer.  So while so many things are being repeated, I think we outta do something about being fucking creative.  We're in this business for a reason, not to recycle the same shit over and over again.

Game of Thrones special, how good writting of one series is ruining my enjoyment of others

I am a massive fan of Game of Thrones. I haven't read the books yet, and I'd imagine that short statement is going to send alerts to the snobby GoT book readers who want to ruin the enjoyment of this series to everyone who hasn't read the books because they're assholes. Jesus, what a way to start, insulting the only follower of my blog and making them run away. Upon finishing season 4, I went to see the new X-men movie which many people were raving on about it being so amazing and the best one yet. It's not, First Class is by far the best X-men movie (I tend to forget my opinion isn't worth as much as I think it is).

very minor spoilers of X-Men: Days of Future Past 

After finishing the movie, I had a bit of an awkward reaction. I didn't know what to feel. It ended on a really good note, and by that I mean the typical everything is dandy and happy. Now having watched Game of Thrones where bad things happen to good guys and good things happen to bad guys, it felt weird. Maybe 2-3 years ago, I would have just said allright and moved on. But this felt so Hollywood-like that I ended up being very disappointed for the ending, overall movie was a 9/10. Now maybe I am turning into the people I dislike that are wannabe critics who didn't get much attention from their divorced parents and want to be the most cynical people on the internet to get attention .. who knows.

Can dead characters just fucking stay dead?

Not to mention comics have always been known for reviving and bringing up dead characters like it's a fucking game, something that bothers me overall. You can't kill a main character, to make us all feel and thing bring him 10 issues later. Or you can always go about the way shonen manga and just kill them only to show them 3 chapters later that they're not really dead. Great job everybody, you're really giving me a sense of danger, especially knowing at the back of my mind that they will come back eventually for marketing $. Can characters just stay dead?

Game of Thrones makes me feel for characters, the sense of danger is real and not fabricated nonsense. I like that the bad guys had good qualities and that the good guys have qualities you see in bad guys usually, because none of us are perfect. We're all extremely flawed starting from me and then moving on up to much better human beings. I think great, realistic storytelling may have influenced my preference and opinion on storytelling after becoming such a big fan of Game of Thrones. Cheesy good endings have always irked me a little bit, but it's now more apparent after watching a series like GoT that's brutal in too many ways to list. I hope writers and directors take a note from GRRM and others like him to write more realistic storytelling from now on.