It couldn't have happened at a better time. Ty Burr has just asked (and answered) the question Are the movies dying? You might be able to guess the answer by examining Mr. Burr's home life.
When my wife and daughters and I head to the multiplex to see the latest Pixar or ''Fever Pitch" or what you will, the experience is often about everything but the movie. It's about costly tickets, snacks priced at three times the market rate so the theater owner can cover his ''nut," 20 minutes of aggressively loud commercials and coming attractions, followed by a print unspooling with a big green gouge in it while two morons in the row behind us talk about somebody named Denise. In the early 21st century, that's entertainment, and that's a problem.
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As for grown-ups, the film industry has by and large written them off. This may be a smart business move -- most of my peers are too exhausted to do much beyond popping in a Netflix movie and falling asleep 30 minutes later -- but it leaves filmmakers and audiences with depressingly few options.
The most chilling insight comes wrapped in clever word-play and provides a disturbingly bleak vision of the future.
Yes, there are foreign and smart indie films -- movies that, outside of a Michael Moore-size fluke or random ''Napoleon Dynamite" explosion -- play to a tiny fraction of the moviegoing public. And there are savvy art-house theaters... With luck, such theaters will survive as shrines to an art form and to the best way to see it. Just as jazz started mutating in the 1950s from a commercial sound into music for cerebral iconoclasts, so too do the most creative impulses of American film now play to the converted in small, clublike settings.
In my defense I must say that my friend Denise is the bassist for Sonny Rollins.
Wow, very interesting article, thanks! I'm gratified to read that's only only the death of theatrical viewing he's forcasting, and really liked the last page where he imagines where movies might go in the future.
In spite of the citation of the films Pulp Fiction , Magnolia and Traffic I think that Stephen Farber provides more evidence that films (as opposed to "movies") will follow the path of jazz and become an art form for the intelligentsia.
It couldn't have happened at a better time. Ty Burr has just asked (and answered) the question Are the movies dying? You might be able to guess the answer by examining Mr. Burr's home life.
The most chilling insight comes wrapped in clever word-play and provides a disturbingly bleak vision of the future.
In my defense I must say that my friend Denise is the bassist for Sonny Rollins.
Wow, very interesting article, thanks! I'm gratified to read that's only only the death of theatrical viewing he's forcasting, and really liked the last page where he imagines where movies might go in the future.
In spite of the citation of the films Pulp Fiction , Magnolia and Traffic I think that Stephen Farber provides more evidence that films (as opposed to "movies") will follow the path of jazz and become an art form for the intelligentsia.
Yipee?
Have a good 'un!