Lately, I have noticed that contempory entertainment is entirely lacking in quality. If you've ever seen an Olive Garden commercial, you know what I'm talking about. They can dress up and make it look all nice with HD and good fashion sense, but the scripts suck, and the actors are worse. It's almost like they have all the money to make something great, but they don't use it right at all. It's a bizarre sensation I get whenever I hear some dumb joke or poorly done scene that makes me want to turn off whatever it is without hesitation. If you have this same hunch, I am wondering why you think this might be.
America's constant focus on aesthetics over other qualities that are necessary for a culture to thrive.
Some of it is our instant culture. Operas used to take days to tell a story, if a movie takes more than 1-1/2 hours it gets panned for being too long. (I prefer the movies myself) People are filling their heads with information(internet), but not knowledge(books). Book readership is way down. Does anyone make albums these days that tell stories? Or is everything just 3.5 minutes made for the radio? (I really don't know the answer to this question) If it takes too long to develop the entertainment, people phase out. I am guilty as the next. We are the ADD generation.
"ADD generation"....heheh, so true. I know so many people with ADD. I myself constantly feel retracted from reality. It's hard to focus on something I don't really care about at all. I hate reading. But is that my fault? I think there ARE different and effective ways of acquiring knowledge, just not AS effective. They have a lot more by-product than simply reading the naked truth. That's why I excercise my intelletuality on these forums. It keeps your mind clear.
Here, I'll put it in nice plain English. People like pretty things that make them feel good, and it's sacrificing the deeper qualities that a culture needs to create it's own identity.
That explains why the good guy always wins, I guess. It also explains why more movies like Children of Men don't come out... Christ, that was a good movie. I'm hating Holly Wood more and more...
It's everywhere. I'm a musician and composer and am highly critical of music that I hear. Yesterday. I was in a DSW shoe store and was hearing some of the most pretentious music of my life. There was a "song" that was eight minutes long, and it's "melody" was just two notes alternately held for several measures while some busy percussion and fast chords were playing underneath. Then, there was another "song" where some guy with the most obnoxious nasal voice kept chanting something unintelligible over and over, ending each stanza with something that sounds like, "She lies like sheep." Now, you can dismiss my observations by saying, "Oh, it's just background music. It's not supposed to be actively listened to." Here's the kicker: as I was walking around, I saw some 20-ish people that would not look out of place in those Olive Garden commercials that SimplyGenius had described, and these people were singing along with the songs, making up the lyrics as they went along! They didn't know what they were singing!!!
Children of Men was a great movie, but from an artistic standpoint it doesn't have much staying power. I can't watch it very often because of the climax, and it was also poorly written. Other than that, the movie's premise and message were very clear, and very straight forward. Life. As for culture, I'd like to make the point that America doesn't even have much of a defined culture yet, so how can it be dead if it never existed?
I wouldn't call it "dead"; I'd call it "comatose". In Joe Queenan's book, Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon, Queenan sets off to see what's so bad about American culture and comes to the conclusion that it's not bad, it's mediocre. It's not bad enough to make fun of.
