Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Bored of the best ever



There's an increasingly irritating tendency to give in to all the hype, to really buy into the bullshit, and confidently declare that some new piece of entertainment is the greatest thing in the history of forever. Or that it's the biggest pile of shit ever created. Nothing in-between - it's always got to be the best, or nothing at all.

It's understandable we all want to think we live in the most fascinating of all times, and that the entertainment we consume is the biggest and bets ever, and don't really recognise that so much of the current culture is purely disposable, and that vast swathes of it are just okay.

Sporting events have been doing it for decades, and promising that their games and matches and races are the most amazing thing to happen, and sometimes they even deliver the greatest spectacle on the planet, because things like that can happen in the unpredictable world of high-impact sports.

At the movies, it's genuinely hard to figure out the worthy from the over-hyped, especially when the experience of any film is going to be so subjective. The Marvel movies are the best example of this, where new films are endlessly praised as the best thing ever, or panned as the worst possible outcome, when the inexorable truth is the films are fine, just fine.

It's weird to meet people who revere them, just as much as it's off-putting to met somebody who won't go on about how much they're all because they're all okay. That's all.

There are still great things out there that Stan Lee never dreamed of, and sometimes you can watch something that just blows you away, but mos of the time it's all just hype, it's all part of the game, it's all a bit tedious.

The worst part is that it does drown out those things that are genuinely great, because they are out there. They may really be the greatest thing we've all ever seen, but how much can you trust a crowd that falls loudly for every new Scream movie. 

And I still believe that anybody who says some big new Hollywood thing is the worst movie ever made, because I've seen Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, and that's a low, low bar to tumble over.

It's everywhere in culture now (although I'm not sure if this is part of the nerd culture bleeding through and infecting the mainstream, like the entitlement and tribalism you see everywhere these days), and it's harder to convince anybody that it's okay that some things are just fine. They don't have to be the most amazing thing in the history of forever, sometimes pretty good is good enough.

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