Does anyone severely hate entertainment nowadays?

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I'm not sure if this is an Aspergers/Autistic thing, because I know that other people feel this way. But I wonder if how I feel is actually to a stronger degree than most of the general masses of society. I have a severe dislike for entertainment culture in the 21st century. I'm not saying I hate the 2000s in general, but I strongly dislike some elements of the modern era.

I like a good laugh, but since Robin Williams offed himself, there seems to be very little worth laughing about.

There are people who have said that kind of thing every decade for all of eternity. It's nothing new, it's nothing profound, nor does it have anything to do with the current state of pop culture. Your tastes just simply aren't aligned with others in your generation. Find something new or old that you like and spend more positive energy talking about those things than speaking negatively about things you don't like.

Eh, I always tend to hate things that are "new", especially if people can't stop raving about them, though oddly, if I re-visit those things years later when the hype dies down, I tend to like them. For instance, I thought the Harry Potter craze was out of hand when I was younger, but I watched part of a few of the movies the other day when they were doing a marathon on TV, and I actually found them to be quite enjoyable.

It seems like the quality of music has taken a nosedive since the 60's and the quality of movies has also since the 80's.

And yet there were people in the '60s who thought that music had taken a nosedive since the '40s. Remember all the protests against the rise of rock and roll in the '50s? "That Elvis creep is just loud noise and shaking hips! Whatever happened to good music, like Glenn Miller?!".

I dunno, it's just a matter of perspective. I get so tired of people looking at the most mainstream of billion-dollar movies and Top 40 pop music and saying "Ugh! Pop culture sucks now!". I guess they're free to restrict their tastes and live in a bubble of cynicism; I still spend every year listening to and watching hundreds of good-to-great underground/independent movies and albums, and I don't have any complaints yet.

Listening to original contemporary music requires years of digging around for it oneself. That's where a lot of my time goes, and I must say it's totally worthwhile.

Depends on the entertainment.

Not entertainment in general. That's too broad, and as a description "hate" is generally too strong.

I will say that I don't like too much of what I see now. Comedy in particular has pretty much gone to hell. Somewhere around the 90s many screenwriters forgot all but three types of comedy: (1) lowbrow stupidity/bathroom humor (Adam Sandler and his many contemporaries), (2) quirky/awkward comedy that isn't funny, and that's why it's supposed to be funny, except that it really isn't funny to a lot of people ironically or otherwise (Napoleon Dynamite, Between Two Ferns, too many others to list); and (3) pop culture references that are supposed to be amusing just because we get the references, not because it's part of an actual joke (Family Guy, Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg movies). These trends all got old very, very fast.

Directors like Michael Bay, James Cameron, Roland Emmerich, and Uwe Boll certainly helped to lower the IQ of the average movie--if such a thing could be measured. Somebody invented one of the worst shows on TV, Jerry Springer, and then one-upped it with TMZ. These are often described as "guilty pleasures." I know the concept well but in their case I don't see where the pleasure part comes in. And then we have Internet phenomena such as the Fred show on Youtube. (I'm not saying things were so much better before all of these trends, because I wasn't there.)

I can't deny that things look pretty grim. But I deal with it by collecting only the shows that I want to watch. My TV isn't connected to anything but my VCR and DVD player, so it never shows anything I don't want it to. And I'm doing just fine with music, as long as I look in the right places. Pop and rap have absolutely nothing new to say anymore; you've got to look in prog, metal, and online for that.

It's weird that you throw Uwe Boll in there, since for his brief stint in mainstream Hollywood (2003-2007-ish), all of his films were low-budget affairs which made paltry amounts at the box office and had little popularity. Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich's films are all blockbuster mega-hits and they continue to dominate popular culture, whereas Boll's biggest film grossed only $13 million and he's been more or less forgotten by the public as he now exclusively works in direct-to-video releases.

And I kinda have to disagree about James Cameron. Don't get me wrong, 'Avatar' was very lacking in substance and 'Titanic' is a little overrated and both no doubt contributed to the "special effects over story" mentality prevailing in Hollywood these days, but I'll definitely give him a pass for 'Aliens' and 'Terminator' 1 and 2. 'The Abyss' is a little divisive but I liked it and 'True Lies' is better than most of the action films being made today. I mean, I won't forgive Michael Bay just because he had a hit with 'The Rock', but James Cameron I'll give a thumbs-up to.

I'm popping in here to agree. I'm old enough now (47) to have gone through several iterations of this.

In the 70's, there was much complaint that popular music was so much better in the 60's ( Jimi Hendrix really was better than Foreigner).

In the 80's, there was much complaint that popular music was so much better in the 70's ( Dark Side of the Moon was a much better album than the one hit wonders of New Wave with one good song on an otherwise terrible album).

In the 90's there was much nostalgia for the groundbreaking cinema of the 70's ( the first Star Wars movie was authentically better than The Phantom Menace).

In the 2000's, there was weeping for the Death of Rock since Hip Hop had taken over (since The Who really were better than Three 6 Mafia even though Three Six Mafia won an Oscar for best original song)

By the 2010's and on, much gnashing of teeth happened because of the rise of Reality TV (All in the Family was a far more authentic slice of life than Keeping up with the Kardashians).

But there hasn't really been an overall decline. I cherry picked the above examples which is what people often do when making a yesterday good:today bad lament. That or not realizing that you are seeing the first examples of a rising art form.

The complaints seem to come in two broad categories:

1)not realizing that you are seeing the first examples of a rising art form (Elvis vs Glen Miller). This is a common but not inevitable part of aging. As Grandpa Simpsons said on the Simpsons, .

2)cherry picking terrible new stuff to compare with wonderful old stuff (what I just did above). This is a common but not inevitable part of youth. In youth, you are surrounded with everything that is current and much of it is terrible. There was a lot of terrible stuff in the past too but it just fell so far off the radar (because it was terrible) that you aren't even aware it ever existed. The wonderful stuff got preserved and either became an iconic cultural reference (like Jimi Hendrix) or got rediscovered by later generations who could appreciate their art in a way that people at the time didn't (this happened to Vincent Van Gogh).

I like James Cameron's films as well. They may not be particularly intellectually stimulating, but they're definitely great popcorn flicks, and sometimes that's what I want to see. Micheal Bay on the other hand, I'm not a fan of.

There's nothing wrong with "popcorn flicks". There will always be stimulating artistic movies of great depth and substance, so there's nothing wrong with indulging yourself in a little brainless entertainment every now and then. Pauline Kael once said, quote, "Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them", and I've always lived by those words.

I'm neither a fan of Michael Bay nor his production company Platinum Dunes, but the latter easily makes the worse films. I'll give Bay partial credit for 'The Rock', which was a fun dumb action film, and 'Pain & Gain', which was a surprisingly funny dark comedy, but almost everything else either is or appears awful. Some of my friends, including a few seasoned movie buffs, have said that they liked 'The Island', but I really don't get the appeal.

I like only 60's music even though I was born almost 10 years after the decade ended.

The quality of television has gone up though, Lost was great for the first few seasons, Breaking Bad, some people love Mad Men and Walking Dead.

In the 80's and 90's TV was pretty bad except Star Trek the next generation.

Not unless you love cheese, like I do! In the '80s you had 'Knight Rider', 'AutoMan', 'Manimal', 'The A-Team'...the '90s had 'Baywatch', 'V.I.P.', 'Thunder in Paradise', 'Renegade', 'Xena'/'Hercules'...rrgh. Can't get enough of that stuff.

To be fair, there were some legitimately phenomenal programs: 'Hill Street Blues', 'Twin Peaks', 'NYPD Blue', 'The Larry Sanders Show', 'Mystery Science Theater 3000', 'St. Elsewhere', 'The Wonder Years'...every decade has its good and bad.

The sad thing about James Cameron is that he is a very good film director, but fancies himself as a screen writer as well. The result is films like Avatar that are expertly crafted, but have appalling plot lines and dialog. Similar circumstances with Peter Jackson who uses his wife to write the scripts and Chris Nolan who uses his brother to write his scripts. This is like hiring a plumber to service your car, but no-one seems to worry these days as films made by Cameron, Jackson and Nolan are making fortunes at the box office and the film audiences are made up of teenagers who have never seen a film made before the year 2000. Just when you give up on the standard of movies made today in Hollywood along comes along a movie that blows everything out of the water. Such a film is Hotel Budapest, which is expertly crafted and scripted and brings back the joy of film making.