[wfme]

Life is about more than optimizing the movies you watch.

Watching a bad movie is not going to harm you. Maybe you'll take something away, maybe you won't.

Much like having a bad day is unlikely to ruin your life - it'll just give some nice context to the good days.

And we're talking about watching them on the plane, so the "busy person" argument really doesn't apply here.

[listenallyall]

You aren't wrong but it's not an argument you're going to win. A bad restaurant or a dumpy hotel, etc won't kill you either, yet most people rely heavily on crowdsourced reviews. It's just a part of the culture today, given how prevalent ratings are. This isnt 1940, so suggesting, out of the blue, "just go watch the movie regardless if it is any good" isn't going to convince someone to do so.

[crazygringo]

> Life is about more than optimizing the movies you watch.

Where did I say it wasn't? That's a straw man.

But if you're going to watch a movie for the next two hours, then yeah -- your life is going to be about that movie. So why not choose wisely?

> Watching a bad movie is not going to harm you. Maybe you'll take something away, maybe you won't.

Straw man again. And again -- why not choose quality instead of choosing ignorance and rolling the dice?

> Much like having a bad day is unlikely to ruin your life - it'll just give some nice context to the good days.

Again, straw man. Nobody's talking about ruining your life. But why intentionally choose a bad movie...?

> And we're talking about watching them on the plane, so the "busy person" argument really doesn't apply here.

To the contrary. For a lot of busy people, the plane is one of the few moments they have time to watch a movie. So it sure does apply.

You're arguing in favor of choosing bad things, because it's not going to ruin your life. Huh? Shouldn't we have a higher bar for the things we try to choose to spend our time on? You're describing standards that are the lowest of the low -- as long as it doesn't harm you, it's fine. Don't seek anything better. Yikes. I've rarely come across a life philosophy more depressing.

[wfme]

> Where did I say it wasn't? That's a straw man.

This isn't a straw man - I'm not claiming you think life is all about movie optimization. I'm making the point that the effort of optimization might not be worth it in the broader context.

> Straw man again. And again -- why not choose quality instead of choosing ignorance and rolling the dice?

Also not a straw man. I'm illustrating that the downside of a bad movie is so minimal that extensive optimization might not be justified. This directly addresses your argument about opportunity cost by suggesting the cost is actually quite small.

> Again, straw man. Nobody's talking about ruining your life. But why intentionally choose a bad movie...?

Again, not a straw man. I'm making a proportionality argument about how much a sub-optimal movie experience actually matters in practice.

> To the contrary. For a lot of busy people, the plane is one of the few moments they have time to watch a movie. So it sure does apply.

Even on a plane, the stakes just aren't that high. A less-than-perfect movie isn't going to meaningfully impact your life regardless of how busy you are.

> You're arguing in favor of choosing bad things, because it's not going to ruin your life. Huh?

You're interpreting my position as "arguing in favor of choosing bad things," but that's just not accurate. I'm suggesting that the effort of optimization might outweigh the minimal downside of occasionally watching something mediocre. There's a middle ground between actively choosing bad things and obsessing over choosing only the very best.

[crazygringo]

> A less-than-perfect movie isn't going to meaningfully impact your life regardless of how busy you are.

There are movies I've seen that changed my life. If I'd watched a dumb movie instead, yes my life actually would have been meaningfully impacted for the worse. That's the power of art.

> I'm suggesting that the effort of optimization might outweigh the minimal downside of occasionally watching something mediocre.

It takes a few seconds to check Rotten Tomatoes. A movie is around two hours. In what universe would you rather waste a couple of hours in order to save a few seconds?

And it's not occasionally watching something mediocre. Most movies are mediocre. You have the choice of usually watching something mediocre, versus usually watching something high-quality.

Again, you're strawmanning with "obsessing over choosing only the very best". Where did I describe an obsession? I'm just saying, check Rotten Tomatoes to help pick a good movie. There's just no universe in which the tiny effort to do that is going to outweigh the two+ hours of boredom and frustration of a bad movie.

I genuinely don't understand how you can take the position you're taking with movies, when checking Rotten Tomatoes takes seconds (a minute if you're checking several) and a movie lasts for hours.

[mywittyname]

Bad movies make for great conversation pieces after the flight.

[aoeusnth1]

OP: good movies are better than bad movies. Replies: you buffoon, you actual clown. How dare you value good things more than bad things.

I can’t take this knee jerk response seriously. Why wouldn’t good movies be more worthwhile than bad movies? How is this even controversial?

[jazzyjackson]

Because whether a movie is good or not is not an objective, one dimensional thing that can be represented by a score on rotten tomatoes?

[crazygringo]

It's not perfect, but it's a very strong and useful signal.

Never in my life have I seen something with 98% and thought, well that was a crap movie.

And never in my life have I seen something with 35% and thought, that was amazing!

It's more in the 75-90% range where you have to consider the "dimensionality" of the thing, like whether it's a genre you like, or which individual reviewers match your tastes more precisely.

[jazzyjackson]

Yeah I guess you're right, even the "so bad its good" movies get points for being campy and the love it / hate it reviews average out.