The reason that movies these days are so boring and predictable is because the entertainment industry has become very lax in enforcing copyright laws for novels, choosing to re-hash old formulas that they feel that they own because they act as a monopoly and do not respect the rights of individual authors.

Disney has been criticized for

  • refusing to pay authors' royalties for companies they purchased.
  • ripping off Zootopia from a screenwriter who had pitched it to them.

and I can clearly see that the book publishing industry has been infected by an unbridled passion for rapid re-hashes of copyrighted work by uncompensated individuals.

Maybe you don't care in the short term, but in the long term, the quality of art suffers when individual rights are not respected. There is a trickle down effect as automated tools recycle stories while making only minor substitutions. It is a broken filtering process that leaves us with rehashed story templates and machine assisted authors who do nothing more than put new clothes on the same product again and again. The product is glossy and pretty, but boring and stupid because you've already seen it ten times already.

This is ironic, since copyright law is meant to encourage the creation of good art. One doesn't want the law to be so restrictive that artists are afraid to create something lest they will be sued, but, when it is too lax, the production of good art is also restricted because good quality, multidimensional, human products are unable to rise above the groupthink noise created by a machine that produces incessant, trite, single-dimensional copies.

The machine or the group is simply not as smart as an individual, even though it thinks it is. While individuals analyze things in a multidimensional fashion that tends to be entertaining and surprising, people within groups train themselves to deal with single dimensions of an issue and find lazy shortcuts to achieve group goals.

This is why we are being forced to suffer through the same old movies with lazy, minor substitutions of characters attributes. I don't want to watch a female version of Ghostbusters or Star Wars or Back to the Future. Those were stories written by men about men living in the 1980s. Women today are not like men from the 1980s. We wouldn't replace women with men in Mean Girls or Jennifer's Body because when we re-hash and repurpose things in such a lazy way, the result is transparently artificial -- and often uncomfortably absurd.

Good art is authentic and tied to the experiences of a real character that we want to get to know because they have seen aspects of the world that we haven't seen.

The movie insider in the video below blames bad movies on

  • cliches and recipes
  • people who follow money at the expense of vision
  • group decision making processes

He knows something is wrong, but he seems to lack the tools to explain why we have ended up with a bunch of childish, dumb cartoons and nothing that is original.

He gets to the point more quickly in this video:

I think that if copyright standards were enforced as they should be, on behalf of the original author and not on behalf of a monopoly, we wouldn't have this problem because the original author would be properly paid and would say, 'no' when asked if his or her story should be re-written with genders swapped or locations updated.

I largely quit watching movies and tv shows back when the internet entered my life because I didn't like what was playing and couldn't connect them to any grounded, communal experience that had meaning for me. They didn't tell the story of my relationship to technology or of how technology was changing my community. They didn't make me feel connected to a community.

Part of the reason for this lack of communal connection is that no one can tell what people are actually consuming or enjoying because everything is buried in money laundered internet junk, bots, and fake reviews. The sense of shared culture or enjoyment has been lost amid an infinite selection of products that are all shallow and uninteresting. None of them hack that sense of transcendence that gives an experience meaning.

Instead, what I see is aggressive vanity and psychotic meaninglessness.

It is an absolute nightmare. 

"I'm not here for your entertainment, I'm here for your money." "You know it's over before it begins." "I don't need you or anyone. I just need money."

I try to avoid buying lots of stuff because I don't want to play into greed culture or show my kids that making other people envious is good. Feeling fascinated by the human construction of hand woven, crocheted, or knit products, I bought a few baskets and liked the quality I found in the shops nearby, but when I bought a similar basket from the internet, the construction was so bad that I do not plan to buy anything from the internet again. I hope that was a good lesson for my kids as well. Shopping locally is important for quality control when all of the online reviews are fake.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, I see that people are watching lots of videos of artists creating meaningless yet pretty pictures that they would never want to own because their minds are so saturated with visual input from the internet that they keep their personal spaces in a state of post-war Scandinavian blankness as a respite from the mental onslaught of online work and play. I sometimes think about buying some meaningless yet pretty pictures from the internet to frame and hang on my walls and then decide that I'd rather make my own and imbue them with meaning..

Meaning and connection. That is what we are all searching for in our entertainment. It doesn't matter if it is a video game or a movie, if it lacks meaning or connection, we learn to hate it for doing nothing more than draining our energy away with repetitive patterns that we've seen a hundred times before.

....

I found the image in the header on Medium, but I'm sure that the author doesn't own the copyright. I'm torn about allowing people to decorate the internet with pretty pictures and sloppy attribution. It seems that when one isn't profiting from the decoration, it should be fair use. Then again, if draconian copyright enforcement stripped the internet of all of its beauty, would people return to decorating the real world and making it beautiful again?

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