Everyday life is boring

"I find Oscar Bait infinitely more interesting than ticket bait"

I agree wholeheartedly.

However, when I judge movies, I think that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If a movie gets an Oscar for the excellent performance of an actor (actually the actor gets the Oscar), but the story is poor, then I still don't want to watch it.

A lot of movies fall through here in spite of their excellent actors, highly impressive scenery or computer graphics, perfect directing and camera, because all of these achievements cannot save a poor story.

I would even go so far to say that I prefer a poorly acted movie with a good story over an excellently made movie with a poor story. Sometimes I think that Hollywood has an acute shortage of good story authors. On other days I think that perhaps many movie-goers go only for the impressive imagery and don't care about the story at all. ("Pacific Rim", "Battleship", "Gravity" come to mind, to name some gorgeous-images science-fiction movies that lack a sensible, believable story.)

DId you read my post? I found this to be a intensely gripping movie. The very strong arc of the movie is not plot driven, but driven by powerful ideas.

Here is the original, where I give an example:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1065073/board/thread/240989390

Of ocurse everyone has their own opinion, but discounting the opinion of others by ascribing some kind of fake motive you dreamed up ("monkey see, monkey do") is lamentable.

I agree to some extent. My expression was inaccurate. What I meant to say is that the depiction of ordinary everyday life in a movie is boring.

It seems though that you would not agree with this either.

And here we are at a crossroads where movie judgments and movie tastes differ. I cannot mete out universal, absolute judgment. I can only say how I perceive the movie. Obviously, many people, including particularly the critics, do not share my movie taste, but I cannot understand why. Have they all grown up under circumstances as miserable as those in the movie? Do they see themselves in the boy?

There is another point that deters me. For this movie they picked a boy who had a life that was both uninteresting (in my view) and unusually unpleasant in parts. Why would I want to see, for example, how a violent alcoholic terrorizes his family? I have never even remotely experienced anything like this. I know that such people exist, but do I want to watch them?

All this also does not really advance the life of the boy in any positive sense. The only thing we can be glad about when watching "Boyhood" is that he did not take more mental damage. I think, to some extent I would have to be a masochist to enjoy this movie.

Yet another point is what the boy actually does. I don't see him doing anything interesting. He seems to react to his environment in a submissive way. The only thing where he sticks out is his photography, but the movie almost tries to suppress this. We get to see it only in very few scenes, he scarcely talks about it, there are no explanations, we hardly get to see any of his photos.

Even meeting the girl in the ending is not his achievement. She descends on him purely by accident. He did not choose her, and she did not choose him. What in the world did the story author think? That finding a partner happens on its own? Here the movie is not even boring, it also becomes unrealistic.

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Other offenders include 45 Years, The Hurt Locker & The Wolf of Wall Street. None really have any real conflicts. They just follow the characters in their every day lives without any obvious point to it all.