The realities of modern movie consumption

I probably don't need to write a lot about the screen shot I took when I was on our Australian streaming service Stan on Monday night, because it's pretty self-eplanatory. I was looking for something that -- yes -- did not require very much of my proactive mental engagement or my stamina, considering that it was actually my fourth movie of the day and I was starting it after 10 p.m. (Don't worry, I also got to the beach and went into the pool with my son, as well as made a mix and wrote a blog post. So it was a very productive day despite also featuring four movies.) And even though I selected only the 82-minute New Zealand film The Breaker Upperers, which I'd already seen and really liked, I did not make it through and still needed to finish it yesterday. 

But I didn't go specifically looking for such movies. This category presented itself to me within Stan's comedy section without me having to do anything.

It did make me wonder which movies they saw it fit not to include in this category. I'd like to know what their idea is of a sophisticated, requires-all-your-mental-acuity comedy. I suppose if Stan carried the Knives Out movies, and classified them as comedies, they might qualify.

As it was, the movies I saw while scanning were very similar to those in the categories "classic comedies," "frat pack comedies" and the humorously broad "funny films" -- which you'd hope would encompass any film in the comedy section. They did have a number of more useful categories like "indie comedies," "dark comedies," "rom-coms" and "bloody funny," that last being horror comedies. 

Even though I am, of course, disdainful of the idea of a movie you can watch while being on your phone throughout, I have to admit that I am not always avoiding the temptation to be on my phone during all the movies I watch. One movie I watched on Monday, I watched during the morning time slot, and I think being on my phone for part of it was an indication of my guilt and my sense that I should be doing something else at that time of the day.