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MOVIE MEDITATIONS

Making Preview Reviews once a week isn’t enough when it comes to keeping track of what’s going on in the movie world.

There’s only so much philosophy that can be explored in Pre-Res and I’ve been feeling the need to ponder the bigger ideas as movie news emerges, as technology advances, as the art from evolves and as our  (the audience’s) tastes change.

So let’s take a look around and see what’s going on and figure our what it means for our movie yesterdays, todays and tomorrows.

MON/TUESDAY, MAY 23RD/24TH - THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF MOVIES

Today that early “film” is viewed as an experiment. It’s an infant, stumbling, bumbling and sh*tting itself as it learns to adapt to the functions of its nature. Then, you had to get dressed up for like an hour, especially if you were a lady, venture over to the nickelodeon on foot or in a horse-drawn carriage, pay a nickel (extra credit for anyone who adjusts that with inflation), watch the less-than-a-minute-long show while trying not to blink, cause hey, blink 5 times during the movie and you’ve missed 10% of it! Then, turn back around and spend equal time getting back down to your knickers. Yeah, let’s do THAT every weekend! What a bunch of primitive losers. If only they had been around now, they could just press a button on their phone, something which didn’t exist at that time, click on this link, and watch it instantaneously, anywhere.

Maybe it’s just me, but lately I’ve been feeling like the movie theater doesn’t matter anymore. The “magic” of going to see a movie on the big screen has vanished like my belief that Reality TV isn’t scripted.

This hit home while I was flipping through the cable TV menu and a promo for the indie-not-yet-released romcom Love, Wedding, Marriage mentioned, “See it on demand BEFORE it hits theaters!”

Wait, wait, wait...what? I can see it on pay-per-view before I have to pay MORE money to see it on the big screen? Wtf is the point of going to the show to see it? Of course I’m gonna pay less, not waste $5 a gallon gas, not have to fight for parking, not have to put up with the wife who has to explain the plot to her ask-a-question-after-every-scene husband and not take a shower, get dressed and buy overpriced popcorn and soda. Who thought of this idea?

Aside from the time, money and energy aspect of the situation, what’s really significant is the message this sends: small films are no longer sensible on the Big Screen (more on this in a future post), and, more importantly: movies don’t HAVE to be seen theatrically.

When I was in film school about 10 years ago, I remember a teacher, who at the time was in his 50s, talking about having to catch showings of classic films ONLY in theaters. Not because he was a film snob, but because that was the ONLY way to see them! In the 60s and 70s there was no “home rental” market. There was no cable. There were basically 3 TV channels that went off air at midnight until the morning drive shows at like 5 in the morning. Really great films weren’t rerun. If somehow a classic made it on air it would be edited and cropped, destroying the content and the technique. Re-releases were the way to catch John Ford westerns or foreign boundary pushers from Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni. For those that didn’t make it stateside there were critics like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael helping to raise awareness, cause if a “run” of a film was missed, there was no way to know when another chance would come along. Usually, you’d have to wait YEARS to be able to see it again.

That was it. And it was at the theater. The only place to go. The only place to be. The church of cinema, every Friday a two-hour mass. A date with the celluloid holy spirit flashing at 24 frames per second, washing over the senses, transporting our consciousness and possibly transforming us. That’s the sign of a great film: you’re not the same exiting as you were entering.

There was a certain respect, a level of importance, of reverence, of anticipation and expectations. Kind of like waiting until marriage to have sex. Like there was something special that needed to be shared only after a ceremony. And that traditional passage entailed making a “night of it.”

Do some research on the movie palaces of old. They used to sit THOUSANDS. They were huge, glamourous and elegant. Before television, newsreels delivered weekly information to the public, there were cartoon shorts, double features and intermissions. It was an event.

Over the years the paranoia about new technology destroying the place movie theaters have in our entertainment lives has always remained high. Sound would ruin it. Television would keep people at home. VHS then DVD would cause everyone to abandon the Big Screen. It all turned out to be panicked thinking. Until...the Internet.

With high speed connections, infinite Cloud storage plus wi-fi and smart TV-screen phones that paranoia is justified. Now, it’s just common sense.

Hulu, Netflix and Xfinity have obliterated the distribution models of the past. They’re dropped medium redefining atomic bombs on the old structure of movie making. Everything may look okay at first glance, but it’s not and the aftershock tidal waves are many, inevitable and unstoppable (more on this in future posts). The in-the-end effect? The devaluation of the Big Screen. The pulling back of the curtain to reveal OZ. Having these options makes us cross metaphors and ask, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

Why go to “the movies” when you can see it at home? The forced attempt at 3D-ifying every movie is a gimmick aimed at recapturing theatrical value, but that’s been rejected by a tired-of-paying-high-prices cynical already-getting-jacked-at-the-pump audience. While it has been successful (Alice in Wonderland made over a BILLION worldwide) it isn’t receiving much respect (not that it matters to the box office bottom line) and is primarily reserved for “event pictures” (The King’s Speech wouldn’t make much of a 3D or IMAX experience).

Consider also that, content wise, TV is having a golden age. Because talented and frustrated artists are handcuffed by big screen bottom lines they’ve flocked to a medium that allows more freedom and control and demands quality (more on this, yep, in a future post) - more reason the Big Screen has lost it’s pull. Once the sun which all other mediums orbited around, it has been demoted not to planetary status, but to that of a moon - lifeless and barely noticeable.

It’s easy to say that the laws of Capitalism have led to this downfall. After all, how many times do we tell ourselves, “I don’t have time to see (blank movie) at the show. It’ll be on DVD in like a month, I’ll wait till then.” Where as before it was, “That looks interesting, if I don’t see it now, who knows when I’ll have the chance.” We can’t blame studios and really the conglomerates that own them for wanting to cash in on the vast and stagnating hours of entertainment just hanging out on the shelves of the library vaults. But, the assembly line transition from big screen to rental/on demand has neutered much of cinema’s life force. Let’s say it only has one ball right now - still having the capability but not looking, feeling or behaving the same.

Then consider that the Big Screen isn’t the place where story goes to be daring, it’s where it goes to cash in, and we’re even less motivated to make the effort. Playing it safe is the profitable thing to do. Risk, while it’s exhilarating - ah-la Pulp Fiction - doesn’t always translate to profitability - ah-la Fight Club. If we want boundary pushing we go to HBO or even AMC; if we want expectations met, comfort zones respected, we go to the theater.

Towards the end of 12 Monkeys, Cole (Bruce Willis) and Kathryn (Madeleine Stowe) watch a movie and he mentions seeing the film when he was younger, but now, it’s different. The key, he mentions, is not that the movie has changed, but that HE has. This usually is the case, but not here. It’s the movies that have changed (because of the technology used to distribute them). There are more of them, everywhere, all the time. The market is flooded, oversupplied and as a result they have no power, no impact, no weight. The lightness of movies hasn’t made them unbearable, just forgettable.