Losing control, or ceding control, or not...
Mr. Lazarescu pukes blood strings on his living room rug. He is not at all well.
Critics, filmmakers and pundits have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about what "digital" means for the future of cinema, and about the sorry state of the audience for foreign language films (not just distribution and exhibition, but demand) in the United States in the age of the DVD. Much of this speculative writing has been hopelessly vague and rather dismal -- and, in some cases, I don't think the writers really understand what they're talking about. But for every dozen "digital doomsday" observations, there's a concrete insight that's worth considering.
I'd like to take excerpts from three recent pieces and follow a thread that I think connects them:
David Denby, The New Yorker (January 8, 2007):
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.A.O. Scott, The New York Times (January 21, 2006):
The [National Society of Film Critics] vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain. [NOTE: Subsequently, the mostly-foreign-language films "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Babel" were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, while "Pan's Labyrinth" received six nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film.]David Lynch, in his book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" (published December 28, 2006):The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing.... The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.
I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead. If you look at what people all over the world are taking still pictures with now, you begin to see what's going to happen. I'm shooting in digital video now and I love it. [...]I think Lynch, Scott and Denby are all correct in what they say above. Although elsewhere in his piece, Denby oversells an idealized view of "the theatrical experience" (which "theatrical experience"?) as if all 16mm, 35mm and/or 70mm (or VistaVision or Todd A-O or IMAX) presentations were the same: The Best Of All Possible Ways To See A Movie. The most important thing, as I think all of us would agree, is that the audience feel able to submit to the film. We may fight it, we may be unwilling to go where the film wants to take us, but we should, as Lynch says, be allowed to "go into that world."How we see films is changing.... A tiny little picture, instead of a giant big picture, is going to be how people see films. And the good news: At least people will have their headphones. Sound will become, I think, even more important.... The whole thing is, when those curtains open up, and the lights go down, we must be able to go into that world. And it many ways, it's getting very difficult to go into a world. People talk so much in theaters. And there's a tiny, crummy little picture. How do you get the experience?
I think it's going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But the possibility is there for very clean pictures -- no scratches, no dirt, no water marks, no tearing -- and an image that can be controlled in an infinite number of ways. If you take care of how you show a film, it can be a beautiful experience that lets you go into a world. We're still working out ways for that to happen. But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we've just got to get real and go with the flow.
There's no question that "the theatrical experience" and the "video experience" can be different -- and there are many varieties of each. I've seen video projected on the big screen where the image depth, clarity, richness and stability is actually better than most 35mm presentations -- even when the movie itself was originally shot on film. I've seen 16mm prints in living rooms and classrooms with wooden chairs and movie theaters, and 35mm films in concert halls and projected on the exterior walls of buildings. All of those experiences are quite different, a matter of the quality of the print, the size and nature of the projection/presentation, and the environment in which the image is encountered.
So, I get a little irritated when people generalize about "video" (or "digital") without considering that their terminology could encompass cable, satellite or broadcast television signals, third generation slow-speed analog VHS dubs, LaserDiscs, DVDs, HDTV, Quicktime files, YouTube streaming files, video iPod files -- and we haven't even begun to discuss the different screen sizes and technologies. Let's just acknowledge that watching, say, a video iPod image on a 60" HDTV in a crowded bar is different from watching a LaserDisc image on an old 27" cathode-ray tube TV in your bedroom. And neither of them would probably be considered "ideal." I've seen IMAX movies that I thought would play better on my home system (particularly the sound) -- in part because I wasn't occupying what I would consider my ideal seat in the theater. (Any movie seen from the balcony or rear of the auditorium is, in my experience, akin to watching it on TV from outside your next-door neighbor's window.)
And this is where I finally get to Scott's mention of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." I did not see it in a theater, and I regret that. Not because it is a "big-screen experience"; it's definitely not. It's not even much of a movie -- struck me more like a 150-minute improvisational exercise by a Romanian theater collective that somebody in the company just happened to record with a handheld video or 16mm camera. But because I had a remote control in my hand, I wasn't able to submit to it. I started feeling ill and frustrated (which is no doubt part of the experience the filmmakers wanted me to have) and, on the first try, I couldn't take it. I was feeling a little nauseous even before I popped in the DVD. I paused it a few times (once during the examination of the "blood threads" in the main character's vomit), and finally, after more than an hour (and only two hospital visits), I turned it off, promising that I'd give it another shot when I felt more equal to the task.
Under these conditions, I wasn't able to go through what a friend and critic who liked the movie (and put it on his ten best list) described as the pain and boredom and irritation of the movie, before he finally gave himself over to it. He described it (as have several critics) as being a kind of transcendent experience. But I wasn't up for it. If I'd been in a theater, I would have sat there and gone through it. But because I was in control, it was relatively easy to back away -- even though I wanted to submit.
This, I think, is a more meaningful distinction between theatrical and video experiences than the quality or size of the image. Or even the sound. (I think sound quality is at least as important as the image: Decent headphones and sound can make even a teeny iPod video image seem to expand and fill your head -- or your field of attention. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for a first-viewing experience of most movies, though.)
Both Lynch and Denby have expressed reservations about HD. Lynch says, "If everything is crystal clear in the frame then that's what it is -- that's all it is." Whereas, "sometimes, in a frame, if there's some question about what you're seeing, or some dark corner, the mind can go dreaming." (There's a powerful moment that illustrates this in "Inland Empire" for me: a shot that I first saw as a close-up profile of a Nosferatu-like figure pressed up against a wall in the darkness. Turns out, it's just a stain -- or maybe even a digital artifact -- on the wall at the end of a dark hallway.)
Denby complains that in a high-definition transfer of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" "high-definition transfer of the film, bringing shapes and textures out of the murk, revealed a gym that was old and shabby but also tidy and scrubbed clean.... And I think that Eastwood, having directed almost thirty films, may have intended “Million Dollar Baby” to look the way it looks on film." In that case, what Denby was looking at was a bad transfer job -- which may have been the fault of the digital mastering engineer, or maybe even Clint Eastwood himself, since Eastwood undoubtedly has approval over how his films look on video. It's not the fault of the technology.
Remember when some early CDs sounded all tinny because they were made directly from the tapes that had been mixed for vinyl? The standard-issue disclaimer on CDs was that the music was "originally recorded on analog equipment" and that "because of its high resolution"... "the Compact Disc can reveal limitations of the source tape."
Which is pure bull.
The CD isn't revealing limitations -- it's accurately reproducing the sound of the source tape which was mixed and mastered to compensate for the technical limitations of vinyl LPs! If David Lynch or Clint Eastwood wants their films to look less "hi-def" and more like film, the technology is absolutely capable of doing that. How does Denby think Eastwood got that selectively desaturated color in "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima"? With high-definition digital interpositives, that's how. (Anybody recall the software that was used to make video look more like film -- adding photographic grain/emulsion to digital images?) Lynch likens the softer texture of the video he gets with his low-fi Sony PD-15 camera to movies of the 1930s (an analogy I question, but that's the way he sees it). But Hollywood movies of that era used all kinds of lenses and filters to get that "soft-focus" look (especially for close-ups of leading ladies). Lynch can go as soft and dark and murky as he wants in HD, using any number of techniques. Put some Vaseline on the lens if you like -- or drape a piece of sheer silk over the camera. Or simply sharpen or soften all or part of any image with readily available digital software, the way people do with their still pictures in Picasa or Photoshop. Nothing's holding Lynch back but his imagination.
And in that respect it's not significantly different than film: The image you see has always been the product of the conditions under which it was shot (lenses, lighting, film speed, etc.) and what was done to it afterwards in the lab (Technicolor processing, pushing exposures, tinting, flashing, etc.). Now, there are just more options for filmmakers to do whatever it is they want to do -- and more options for viewers to see their work.
Comments
Jim,
I must agree 110% with this statement:
"Any movie seen from the balcony or rear of the auditorium is, in my experience, akin to watching it on TV from outside your next-door neighbor's window."
It's a complete waste of money and experience to sit in the back of a movie theater; it's so distant and cold, and even logically, the size of the screen from that distance is pretty much the size of your TV when you're sitting on your couch.
I love sitting just on the closer side of the middle, just enough so that the screen immerses me, but I can watch it comfortably.
Posted by: pacheco | January 26, 2007 05:38 AM
Jim, excellent points! I often sense that I don't understand this brave new world of projection, and you've enlightened me. I wonder how often Denby sees a movie in a crowded suburban multiplex with poor projection that is auto-started and unattended, and whether he'd feel the same way about the so-called magical experience. I often watch letterboxed films on a tiny, portable DVD, and if you're up close enough with headphones, you're not missing anything. (I even saw Army of Shadows on a VHS screener tape and didn't feel like I missed anything visually.) Although I do prefer to see certain films on a big screen, naturally.
And your analogy between film and vinyl lovers (the warmth! the warmth!) strikes me. As does the point that early CDs weren't mixed right, and there will be some catch-up involved with DVDs shot on video.
Although here's one question, why is Lynch positing such a distaste for film? While video probably gives directors more latitude, it would seem that you could get more big-screen intensity and eye-popping look from film stock than video stock. Right? Why all the hatin'?
Oh, and thanks for the warning on The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. You have done me a great favor there. I don't want to be "forced" at home or in a theater to watch somebody going through their vomit.
Posted by: tlrhb | January 26, 2007 05:43 AM
Absolutely agree that the biggest differences between the theater experience and the DVD experience lies in the addition of the "pause" button. I was recently watching TOKYO STORY while I had the flu, and for the first hour some of the film's simplest moments affected me immensely. I had to stop the film about half-way because I was too sick, and when I picked it up again after I was feeling better, the its momentum was broken. My physical vulnerability had enhanced the earlier viewing experience, and with that vulnerability gone and a time gap inserted by me into the film's running time, I could no longer enjoy Ozu's masterpiece at the same level.
Posted by: blueterrier | January 26, 2007 07:19 AM
Movie distibutors really need to stop shooting themselves in the foot. They need to realize celeb starred films are not getting movie go'ers back to the theater. I'am greatful for torrent sites who provide a wide range of movies from around the world. Not all of us americans are afraid to read subtitles and its fantastic to see how many great films there are around the globe.
Posted by: Hannah Elsebo | January 26, 2007 09:27 AM
tlrhb: For Lynch I think it's mainly about the way of working. Those big Panavision cameras are so heavy and hard to move, and you have to change the film magazine every 10 minutes, and it's hard to light for relatively insensitive 35mm film, and basically there's far more waiting for the equipment to be ready than there is actual shooting.
What Lynch says he loves about DV is the smallness and lightness of the camera, its easy maneuverability, and the fact that he can do 40-minute takes if he wants to, allowing him and the actors to "go deeper" into a scene or a moment, and to find things he fears get lost in all the waiting between takes when using conventional film. And, of course, there's the cost and the flexibility. If he sounds angry, it's probably directed more at the people who won't give him financing to make theatrical features (he's distributing "Inland Empire" himself) than at at "film" as a medium. DV technology just allows him to make his movies how and when he wants, and thus to tell the studios and indie distribs to go screw themselves....
Posted by: jim emerson | January 26, 2007 02:51 PM
I love this blog, but I have to take issue with your insistence that a film can't be experienced from the back of a theater (my preferred seat), or a balcony. Too many people insist on this as a matter of fact, and I find it extremely condescending. It's as if you're saying "If you don't experience the film the exact way I do, you're not really experiencing it," which seems to contradict the rest of your post. I've tested out many different seating arrangements throughout my filmgoing life, and I am able to immerse myself fully in a film only when I am in the back. This may be a phenomenon exclusive to the cities I've lived in, but I find other audience members more attentive and less blabby in the back than in the middle or front rows, and the screens are either large enough or theaters small enough to make a minimal difference in proximity to the screen. Also, I like my space, and the back rows seem to fill up last. Need I mention no neck pain from looking up at a screen bearing down on me like a crazed locomotive? I can understand this position only in cases where subtitle readability is impeded or when the theater is so large that you really are a mighty distance from the screen. I would also really like to know the size of your television and your neighbor's windows. If those experiences are akin to mine in the back row of the theater, than I really am spending too much money on movie tickets and should just pitch a tent next to your place.
Posted by: Josh | January 26, 2007 10:09 PM
Josh, you sound like someone who really needs some validation, so let me say that I am a back row type, too. Still, why so sensitive?
Posted by: Dane Walker | January 27, 2007 10:39 AM
Josh: No offense intended. I was careful to use the phrase "in my experience" -- it's a completely personal observation. I feel distanced from the movie if I sit too far back (in part because of my awareness of all the seats between me and the screen). But the larger point was that the experience for a single individual (me) can vary quite a bit depending on where I sit in relation to the screen at any particular showing. You may prefer the back of the house, and may find sitting up close to be disconcerting or dizzying. (I have friends who feel that way.) My intended point was simply that "the theatrical experience" is not a monolithic one, but something different for everybody at every screening, and that one of the factors is a person's preferred seat in the house.
Posted by: jim emerson | January 27, 2007 11:48 AM
Jim: Point taken. I glossed right over the phrase "in my experience" in my haste to stick up for the back row. I wasn't as offended as my post makes me sound, and most of it was meant in a light-hearted spirit, particularly my tent-pitching comment.
Dane: If you knew me, you'd know I'm not over-sensitive and I don't need any more validation than the average person, but I've never read or heard anyone stick up for the back row, and I figured I'd go for it. I've read many critics over the years, and been lectured by many film-buff friends, who strongly suggest (and sometimes insist as a matter of fact) that a film can't be experienced from the back of a theater, and Jim's post and Pacheco's comment were the straw that broke my whiny camel's back. I think I came off harsher than I intended, and lack of sleep and a few beers caused me to make my point a little too fiercely.
By the way, I caught "Inland Empire" today (from the back row, of course) and I think I'll be (happily) recovering from that viewing for weeks. I don't care where you sit in the theater, you're going to experience the hell out of that film.
Posted by: Josh | January 27, 2007 06:19 PM
I'm not sure why home viewing is looked down upon so much. I have a lot more control over my environment there than in a movie theater.
First thing's first. I'm not attending spiffy press screenings where everybody is polite, nor can I afford to always go to the ArcLight. Outside of visits to the latter, I've attended one polite and enthusiastic screening within the last three years, and that was a midnight showing of The Incredibles filled with Pixar, animation and superhero junkies. It was certainly a great way to see the movie. However, at virtually every other screening I go to, my focus on the screen has to contend with a whole lot of inconsiderate patrons. People talking to each other, or worse, being on their cell phones, checking said illuminated phones for texts, crying babies, hands digging through popcorn bags, people walking in and out, teens providing a running commentary on the action, etc. That's what the vast majority of people have to deal with at the movies, and that's why home theaters are becoming more popular and theater attendance is dropping. I can't begrudge anyone that choice since I now make it fairly often, especially with most movies hitting disc a scant three months after their theatrical releases.
At home on my couch I have tons of control. If I want to make sure I stay 'in' the film, I can arrange that. I'll check the running time and make sure I can fit the entire thing in. I can use the bathroom, fill my drink, dim the lights and turn off my phone. Then I can press play and enjoy a disruption-free movie.
Blueterrier mentions being ill and choosing to watch Tokyo Story and having to stop halfway through. Isn't it reasonable to say that the flu is likely to disrupt a film experience whether you're on your couch or in the theater? I can't help but think the problem there was pressing play in the first place, and if not that, then not starting from the beginning for the second try. I hardly think the medium is to fault for that.
All it takes is a little self-control and foresight to avoid problems while watching a movie at home.
Posted by: Daniel J. Winclechter | January 27, 2007 11:46 PM
The back row, or someplace close to it, can be just the right place for me, depending on my mood (I tend to gravitate back there if I'm feeling a bit down, or if the movie is on the somber side). But unlike Josh, I've found the boors and buttheads gravitating toward the back of the auditoriums I've been to lately. I think, for these groups of kids and adults, it's like being in the back of the class-- we can yap to our heart's delight and be as inconsiderate as we want, because we're further away from the action (the screen) than anyone else. As for the proximity to the screen and reducing the size of the screen (and consequently, the ability to lose oneself in the visual/aural experience), even in Los Angeles, unless I head to the Cinerama Dome or the Chinese or the El Capitan or a couple of other large houses, most of the mid-to-tiny sized auditoriums I see most movies in are small enough that sitting in the back row is roughly the equivalent of sitting in the center of any of the bigger, old-school theaters. Sitting too close in on of these 150-200 seater cineplexes can indeed be dangerous to your neck.
Jim, you mention the differences in what the umbrella term "video" can cover when thinking of the exhibition of a film, or how we can see it at home and in what ranges of sizes. But I think it's also worth noting the range to which DV has alread been put in a film's production as well. Certainly for me, a lot of the chill I've felt in considering the rise of DV technology and its implications for film has risen from the thought of film being subsumed by video as we've always known it-- that is, movies suddenly not being just remakes of TV shows content-wise, but little more than video blown up to big-screen size. Even as recently as Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which I saw digitally projected at one of L.A.'s swankiest stadium-age cinemas, I remember being acutely aware in several scenes of scan lines and loss of resolution that I figured was the future-- I guess I'll eventually get used to it and cease to notice.
But in 2006 we saw Lynch embrace the smeary, low-fi end of DV exactly because of its limitations (and what those limitations could themselves lend to the kind of disorienting atmosphere he was after), and Michael Mann, with videographer Dion Beebe, continue the exploration of high-def video for its flexibility and ability to texturalize the nightscapes of Miami Vice that began in Collateral. Mann's movies frequently reveal their video origins, but like Lynch (and in an obviously less formally radical way), Mann and Beebe exploit what video can bring to the visual range without ignoring the recognized framework of a big-budget action film.
Then there are the directors who choose high-def and use it to recreate the warmth, the tactile familiarity of film itself. I was floored, after my second viewing of A Prairie Home Companion, to realize it was shot on high-definition video. Altman had made his previous film, The Company, in this format, but despite that movie being fairly groundbreaking in terms of what uses video could be put to in a wide-screen format, there were still moments when the source of the imagery could be briefly recognized. There were no such moments I noticed in Prairie. How fitting, and again amazing, that the 81-year-old Altman would be at the forefront of using a new technology to perpetuate the glories of a hundred-year-old medium supposed on its last legs.
I had heard also that Apocalypto was shot in high-def, though I haven't seen it so I don't know for myself to what degree the movie succeeds or comes short with the medium. But I was, again, floored when I read just a week or so ago that Superman Returns was also shot on high-definition video. Here is a big-budget fantasy film, like the Star Wars film, shot in this new format, and we're to the point now where even the Premiere-Entertainmnt Weekly vein of movie reportage doesn't feel that the presence of HD video is that big of a story. I don't recall much, if anything, being made of this movie being shot on high-def video. And Superman Returns looked, to these tired eyes, anyway, as if it were shot on film-- there were none of the scan-line distractions I experienced with the Lucas film. (I suppose it's possible that, with no awareness of the format in which the film was shot, I wouldn't have been on the lookout for the visual artifacts that would have revealed Superman Returns as a shot-on-video project.)
Sorry for rambling on so long, but as one who has spent some time worrying about all this inevitable changeover from film to video, and whether or not we were trading in aesthetic value for technological convenience, I find it fascinating that we've come far enough in the span of only about four years, that high-definition video, either in small or big-budgeted films, can be made, if it is the director's choice, to look so remarkably like film, and that video itself would have already revealed itself to have more artistic dimensions than just those limited ones embraced by the DIY-Sundance crowd.
Posted by: Dennis Cozzalio | January 28, 2007 01:27 PM
Three four points:
"If everything is crystal clear in the frame then that's what it is -- that's all it is." Whereas, "sometimes, in a frame, if there's some question about what you're seeing, or some dark corner, the mind can go dreaming."
I read that MacLuhan had a real interest in that aspect.
"...they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small."
I am reminded that before the advent of DVDs, I experienced movies on video tape on a limited TV screen. Besides the overscan and resolution issues of the technology, there's the fact that people didn't put half as much care into the transfers as they do now. I may have been agnostic, but I doubt that I could ever go back. Even badly mastered DVDs are agony now!
"...the possibility is there for very clean pictures -- no scratches, no dirt, no water marks, no tearing...."
And I think the possibilities are even higher with home equipment than with the theaters most people go to! Ok, yes, if the theater has really pulled out all the stops, the presentation is unbeatable. Nightmare Before Christmas as shown in 3D at the IMAX at King of Prussia was amazing. (By the way, why do they call it an IMAX? It's nothing like the IMAXes that I'm used to, where the image is projected onto a huge globe that surrounds you.) But I saw Shrek II at the local sh**hole theatre, and of course they turned the bulb down, and it ruined it. But then off to a better theater, in Oaks, where I saw Marie Antoinette. I'm used to viewing sharp DVD captures at DVDBeaver.com and seeing how wonderfully a DVD can be mastered. When I saw Marie Antoinette, it looked quite soft. Whether the projector wasn't perfectly focused or the print was itself soft, I really have to say that I get a lot better quality control with DVDs on my computer at home. I think I'm right to say this.
"People talk so much in theaters."
Oh my god! Nightmare Before Christmas at the IMAX. Some family brought a noisy little baby. I nearly did my world-famous child punt. What was their selfish rationale? You don't take a noisy baby to the theater (was I spelling it "theatre?" Bloody Brits.) and ruin everybody else's experience. Get a baby sitter or just don't come. And... this makes it even dumber! It was an IMAX 3D movie! Can the baby even use the 3D glasses? I don't think he can! So he doesn't even get to enjoy the film really!
Oh, but later, I saw Pan's Labyrinth... because it looked so cool. And apparently the audience was made up of 10-year-olds. Inappropriate laughter at every opportunity! The instance that really sticks out for me is when the film cut to a shot of a goat being milked. Hands milking goat breasts! Big laughter! Why don't you all just grow up?
And I said this once before. At last year's Oscars, someone told us that epic films had to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated. Other screens just weren't big enough and didn't have enough detail. But, uh, on DVDs, we've usually got enough detail to bring out the grain. I don't think we're missing anything. And the smaller screen size doesn't make us incapable of following the story. I'm not going to miss the metaphors and philosophical play just because the screen wasn't 6 times taller than me.
Posted by: Raymond | January 28, 2007 11:24 PM
The films that I have seen in digital projection have all looked animated. I think this is mainly because I have yet to see any digitally projected films with any real depth of field. (Either there are wide varieties of quality in digital projection, or you are not nearly as picky as I am about this).
I do not know why an art film director would prefer digital, but I expect cost and convenience are probably important. I think action movie directors like George Lucas might prefer digital because, if the entire movie looks animated, the special effects look better, because there isn't an obvious switch between the live action and the special effects. (Also, when I look at my old Return of the Jedi videotape, there are clear outlines where some of the model sequences are spliced into the live action -- particularly obvious in the Luke vs. the monster in the pit, whatever they called it, in Jabba's palace. When the entire movie has been cooked up in the computer, this is no longer an issue).
I still prefer to view movies made on film, and projected the same way, at least until technology catches up with the depth of field from films from 40 years ago (Lawrence of Arabia, for example). Except, of course, when I go to a movie where the light bulb on the projector hasn't been properly set. (Mr. Ebert has devoted plenty of print to this issue -- I wish we could make it required reading for everyone who works at a theater). Anything is better than watching a movie that is too dark to actually see.
As far as the other issues about movies (noise, lack of cleanliness, commercials, cost, etc.), you had better start a whole new thread to discuss some of those issues.
When I was in school, I used to see four movies a week. Now I'm lucky to to see four a year!
Thank you for your excellent blog -- always informative and entertaining.
Posted by: Christy | January 29, 2007 12:51 PM
Josh, here's a defense of the back-row viewing experience from the Answer Man, himself:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040125/ANSWERMAN/40810005/1023
Posted by: Jay | January 29, 2007 02:18 PM