I'm not a movie person. I simply cannot do it and I don't know how people do it. I find it difficult to invest my attention for long-ish periods of time when I don't know whether it will be worthwhile. To a degree I do it much better with books, but even that has deteriorated over time. Now I often leave books half-read, something unthinkable 10 years ago.
I'm not sure why. One thing I know is that I'm very slow at grasping stuff that happens on a screen. I struggle to commit faces to memory, confusing them very easily. There are small cues, somebody flashing some object, making a subtle sign. I miss all such cues. And so when a big reveal happens at some point, something like this person was actually that person in disguise all along, when everyone has their eyes wide open in amazement, I'm still in the stage where I've started to understand who is who and what their roles are in the unfolding drama.
I've also noticed that I can watch a movie and just skim over large parts of it mentally. When I rewatch it, I wonder which movie I watched the first time. I tend to remember the big details, the larger storyline, vaguely.
Thus, the movies and TV shows that keep me to the end can be broadly classified into 2 categories. The first are the very simple, funny TV shows. Friends is the epitome of this genre, and while it's not my favourite, it's the perfect example of a show I will follow. The characters are well-defined, the main stuff is very clear at the very outset. One is awkward, one is stupid, one is nerdy and has a major crush on the pretty girl. One is the pretty girl, one is the quirky girl and one is the obsessive girl. Throw them together and you have a bunch of funny stuff that's happening. Seinfeld is even better - it's just 4 idiotic, stupid people with no self-respect and dignity. There's no need to dig deeper. Of course, I also enjoy word-play and puns.
The other type of movies and TV shows I enjoy are the very intense, happening, action-packed ones. I don't necessarily mean violent or with fighting or war. But again, I guess the word to describe both are simple. I cannot watch long drawn-out dramas, stuff that builds up slowly. Thus, I rarely start watching anything new, preferring instead to endlessly and mindlessly rewatch what I've already watched. But this gets boring quickly as well.
With humour, as in warfare, the main element is surprise. It doesn't matter how funny something is, if you've already heard it, chances are you won't find it funny. And if you can guess the ending of a joke, it kills the joke. Of course, this is different from funny incidents, because they can still draw out laughs when recounted years later as well.
Even Modern Family, a highly rewatchable show, strewn with little nuggets of humour, word-play and little expressions that you would have missed, has a limited shelf life when it comes to rewatching.
Before arriving in Italy for my PhD, I dabbled a bit in learning Italian. I tried duo-lingo, but it was too dry for me. However, I did find a channel named Italiano Autmatico and a playlist for learning Italian with a very interesting concept. The host cited the research of one Stephen Krashen to claim that the key to learning a language is "comprehensible input".
The channel had videos on various topics in Italian with subtitles in Italian and English. Each video had two versions, one the slow version where the host spoke slowly, and one version where he spoke at a normal pace for a native Italian speaker (or as the rest of the world calls it, rapidly). The host suggested that we would learn really rapidly if we just watched the video multiple times. The first few times to listen while reading the subtitles in English and understanding exactly what is being said. After this, you carefully pay attention to the Italian subtitles so you know the exact words being spoken until you're watching a video in Italian, where you know the exact words being spoken and you understand every word. Comprehensible input!
It was an interesting idea and I'm always happy to put such ideas to the test. I didn't stick with it for long though, but I must say it helped me rapidly improve my fluency of Italian from very very rudimentary to very rudimentary. It was an engaging exercise. I had no knowledge of any of the grammar and other constructs. I knew some 20-30 basic words. I couldn't say "Call me an ambulance" or "How do you do" or even "One coffee to go, please". But I could perfectly say "I will make short videos about some interesting topic. The videos will be at most 3-4 minutes long. I will make one slow, like this one, and another faster video."
And this is the thing about learning a language. One way to do it is most certainly to start from the bottom up. Learn the vocabulary, understand the grammar. And "comprehensible input", it would seem, is the other way. Keep listening to the language and understand what is being said. Maybe if you learn how to say 100 different, random sentences perfectly, you will automatically be able to construct 1000s of sentences. Of course, for your vocabulary to grow, you will need way more sentences.
Either way, the idea is appealing, but the implementation is hard. Sticking with something isn't something humans can do very well. Or maybe it's just me.
So last year, I finally enrolled in Italian classes and finally grew from very rudimentary to rudimentary. Once the course concluded, I didn't want to sign up for the next level of courses because the courses were shifted back online from in-person. I didn't want to lose touch with the language either but I had no non-boring ideas.
When I returned to Italy from India after a holiday, I logged on to Netflix and found that the language of the audio had been automatically set to Italian. I changed it immediately to English before I had a thought - why not rewatch shows in Italian? Sure, the shows had stopped being funny after so many repetitions, but they were also very familiar. And if this comprehensible input stuff is correct, then it's the perfect exercise. I knew all the contexts and remembered a good portion of the dialogues.
I've heard of people living in foreign lands learn a language by reading newspapers. I guess the internet generation does things differently, with a lot more panache I might add.
I was in for a very pleasant surprise as well. You see, when you're fluent in a language, you somehow don't have to process the words. When someone is speaking, you just absorb the meaning. The words have to catch up with your thoughts. When you're not fluent in the language and you miss the meaning of words in the middle though, you need to pay attention and process every word separately. Your thoughts must race to keep up with the words you hear.
This did something great for me - I was so caught up in trying to understand what was being said and the meaning of some words that when something funny happened, it came as a surprise. And it became funny again. Of course, translation kills so many of those sweet puns and word-play jokes, but this was a worthwhile price to pay! There I was, watching a TV show for the bazillionth time, still finding a good portion of it quite funny. While also learning words in a new language. Talk about a win-win-win