Results

Call it the excitement of youth or puberty or whatever, but I remember actually feeling an electricity in the air the year “Star Wars” was released. Like a lot of young fans I just couldn’t get enough of the movie, having seen it probably 20 times in 1977 alone. It was the must-see movie for my generation, like “The Exorcist” was for the generation previous …

Fast-forward to January 19th of this year. I was actually disappointed to wake up that morning and find out that “Cloverfield” hadn’t changed the world. I had high hopes. Due to work obligations and being out of the country at the time, I just let seeing the film slip to the point where it almost became a chore. It just didn’t seem worth the effort.

It seems like it’s been since the 80’s since there has been a film worth getting excited about seeing. I mean, I’m talking about the excitement that you don’t even mind that you have to stand in line for three-quarters of an hour or more to get into. When was the last time you actually had to stand in line (longer than 4 people) to get into a movie? Have movies become TV shows? I have always loved movies, but frankly, I’d rather watch a repeat of “House” on my iPod than see nearly anything out there on a big screen.

I hate to admit that the late Jack Valenti may have been partially right, when he, in 1982, made his famous remarks comparing home video to The Boston Strangler (the killer, not the film of the same name); he was talking about home video taking money out of the pockets of (greedy) producers and advertisers but he missed the point (or just didn’t care) that the steady and dependable release of feature films on home video would kill the idea that you had to see something in a theatre or you would miss if completely (or at least until years later when it showed up on television).

Since 1982, the studios realized that there was certainly a lot of revenue to be had selling their movies on cable, video and DVD (and soon downloads) so they made friends with the new technology, but then it was the exhibitors who began to suffer, so they attempted to re-invent the movie-going experience by prettying up their theaters and installing video games and coffee bars, not to mention increasing admission so high a night at the movies now rivals a night at of live theatre.

We’ve been told countless times, and I’ve said it myself, that movies are intended to be seen on the big screen, but that’s not even really true anymore, at least not for any movie made since, say, 2000. More and more, movies are being filmed with the home screen in mind as the end result, and rightly so. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, people aren’t going to be seeing the movie on a big screen in droves, so why bother thinking about the big screen when you look through the lens.

Take nearly any movie pre-”The Matrix” and it is measurably enhanced by seeing it on a big screen, but nearly anything after (even the big, epic movies) the experience on the big screen, small screen and any screen in between is just about the same. I dunno, maybe it is the content. Maybe movies aren’t crafted the way they used to be, maybe “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” really is better than the “3:10 to Yuma” remake. Maybe “Spartacus” really is better than “300″.

But the medium of movies is the big screen. This is where movies need to be seen. Directors need to think about movies the way they used to be, that scope and scale. We have to get back to that somehow, but I think, at this point, there’s just no going back, like trying to convince society to go back to the horse and carriage over the automobile.

I think as the world has gotten smaller, the movie experience has shrunken with it. For all the reasons above it has become less and less essential for movies as movies to exist. It’s now the collective term “media”, “entertainment” or just plain old “content”. The time has passed when an audience applauds at the end of a particularly good film, or cheers when the Death Star blows up, or jolts when the shark jumps out of the water. There’s a disconnection in general between the audience and what’s going on up on the screen, it’s just not important anymore, it’s not unique since we all have it in our home anyway, so why bother getting all keyed-up?

Of course the studios will tell you that illegal movie downloads are to blame for the decline of all movie-going in general (the same way they cried wolf about home video in the 80’s), but you know, a quick scan of some of the comments attached to torrent files for recent films tells a lot (paraphrased):

I Am Legend: I don’t know if there is something wrong with this movie, it starts with a woman talking then there’s a city and everyone’s gone.

Cloverfield: This isn’t a very good bootleg of the movie, it’s very dark and the camera keeps moving around.

Juno: I think this might be a fake because it’s not very good.

You know, frankly, I think these people should be allowed to download movies because I really don’t want them sitting in the same theater as me. People who like movies don’t download movies, the studios know that. But soon that will slide with the widespread legal download of movies and the medium will become diluted even more.

Things change, streamlining happens. Drive-Ins are dead, soon the big screen will be nothing but a faded memory.

[No related posts]