In “The New Yorker,” Joan Acocella treats a review of "The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds" as starting point for a lively, free-ranging essay on Playboy as cultural document -- a monthly anthropological survey of American male heterosexual standards. Her take on the playmate’s changing physique is especially sharp; between the 1950s and today, the post-World War II feminine ideal (the pillowy-ripe gal next door) gave way to flower-child-nymph stylings, disco cheer and then, post-'80s, to a more sculpted, even fabricated norm. “In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media,” Acocella writes. “The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don’t have to. The waist is nipped, 
the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a 'boob job' in 'The Playmate Book' has to do with Miss April 1965, but, like hair coloring, breast enlargement underwent a change of meaning, and hence of design, in the seventies and eighties. At first, its purpose was to correct nature, and fool people into thinking that this was what nature made. But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice.”
In the same issue, though, Anthony Lane muffs a potentially insightful review of Spike Lee’s bank heist thriller “Inside Man” by digressing into his usual cocktail party standup routine. Scrutinizing Russell Gerwitz’s admittedly unwieldy, half-real/half-genre-fantasy screenplay, Lane lists “mistakes” that take us out of the movie. “These include: (1) Voice recognition. [Clive Owen’s bank robber] Russell may be clad in shades and a white balaclava, but he converses with [Denzel Washington’s detective] Frazier in person, and, given that Owen’s American accent keeps slipping like an old sock, it should not be hard to pick him out of a lineup. 
(2) If you own a document that could annihilate your reputation, why keep it in a bank for more than sixty years rather than, say, tossing it in the fire? (3) The document in question, as we learn early in the film, shows that [bank owner] Arthur Case had links with the Nazis. This cannot be true, for one reason: he is played by Christopher Plummer, and, excuse me, but Christopher Plummer does not make friends with Nazis. He sings at them! He plays guitar at them! In a daring, nun-assisted escape, he flees from them over the hills with an annoying child on his back! Come on.” I admit that (2) is pretty dumb, but objections (1) and (3) presuppose that every viewer is as loftily bemused by movies as Lane, and as seemingly incapable of suspending disbelief while watching a glossy Hollywood genre flick stocked with big-name actors. Beneath this review’s breezily charming veneer lies a disquieting presumption: that stars should stick to roles like the ones that made them famous. If Lane ran Hollywood in the ‘50s, James Stewart would never have gotten anywhere near Alfred Hitchcock or Anthony Mann.
Time magazine’s lengthy feature on cinema’s digital future quotes most of the big names you want to hear from (George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez, Michael Mann) and covers a lot of technological and historical ground. But writer Richard Corliss errs, I think, by presenting the film-to-digital changeover as the latest in a long line of technological shifts and implying that anyone who laments it is a fuddy-duddy. Yes, digital filmmaking has made real leaps in the past five years; my own feature “Home” was shot, edited and shown digitally, and could not have affordably finished without that technology, which allowed me to shoot with multiple cameras and edit the whole thing in my house. But as my colleague Godfrey Cheshire observed in his prescient 1999 NYPress piece “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema,” video will never replicate the flickering chemical radiance of film, it will only approximate it. Plus, there are practical objections to the changeover that Corliss fails to address. One is the notion (endorsed by Corliss) that digital is a sturdier format than film, an assertion that depends on your definition of sturdy. Yes, film stock tends to scratch, and when improperly stored, it degrades. (As a film archivist in college, I had to throw out donated 16mm and 
35mm prints that disintegrated when I removed them from the cans.) But on the other hand, properly stored motion picture film stock preserves its information (picture and sound) much more reliably than digital formats, which tend to be more susceptible to data corruption -- and more vulnerable to sudden tech fads that render today's industry standard obsolete tomorrow.
Meanwhile, over at Reverse Shot, Robbiefreeling gives “L’Enfant” the most ringing endorsement I’ve read yet. “How good is it? Let me put it this way: I was walking down the street during lunch break yesterday on this particularly sun-dappled afternoon, and suddenly my mind spontaneously jumped to ‘L'Enfant,’ which I first had seen last fall at the New York Film Festival. The quick recall of the film made me overwrought with emotion, and just the recollection of its encompassing power made me momentarily lose my senses, pass in front of a red streetlight, and almost walk into an oncoming speeding car.” And Clarencecarter defends “V for Vendetta” as both anti-Bush agitprop and (more intriguingly) as one of “the most openly pro-gay blockbusters ever.” A politically-charged comments thread ensues. 
Similarly, Larry Gross at Movie City News begins his own piece with the proposition, "V is about the gayest superhero of all time." Meanwhile, Slate’s Matt Feeney unfavorably compares “V for Vendetta” with Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and dissects Gilliam’s more complex portrait of totalitarian rule. “Whereas ‘V for Vendetta’ adopts the highly movieish perspective of an avenging Übermensch who has himself escaped the tyranny that ensnares everyone else, ‘Brazil’ observes the totalitarian order from within. It presents the subjective experience of administrative tyranny. And it presents this tyranny not as expressing the conscious design of an evil omnipotent dictator everyone can wholesomely hate, but as an inexorable process that slowly envelops the individual trying to navigate it. “
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Some links, for now
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39 comments:
I have yet to read a single convincing case for L'Enfant. It was worse than contrived or pretentious. It was boring.
I haven't seen it yet myself, but I'm going to try to catch it in the next few days.
PS--Did you read that Time article? I am curious to find out what digital filmmakers thought of the issues it raises.
Lane's Sound of Music riff is clearly a joke. You can fault him, if you like, for squandering so many of his column inches on stuff that's funny without also being insightful, but I don't think he means, even implicitly, to suggest that movie stars should refrain from stretching. He just found an opportunity for a laugh and took it. Likewise all the critics who couldn't help noting this week that Liv Tyler seems to have devoted her career to consoling distraught Afflecks.
Yeah, I read the Time piece a week or so ago. Don't remember the particulars too well. Wasn't anything new. The thing you said about digital not replacing the feel of film -- the flicker -- well...the thing most forget is that the average person receives way more visual content via electronic mediums than celluloid. People are used to TV, DVD, online. That's what they're used to. So converting theaters to digital is simply making the image look like what we already see every day. There will come a point when arguing about film vs. digital projection will be like vinyl vs. CD.
Ultimately, for me, it comes down to 2 things. The first is that I probably couldn't have been a filmmaker today if it wasn't for digital -- I'm able to shoot, edit, and release online because of it. And second, I recall I conversation I had with John Carpenter a few years ago where he flat out said how lucky kids of today are to have digital to work with -- and ultimately what matters is telling a good story.
Mike! Is that you? Welcome to the House.
Maybe I cracked down on Lane a bit too hard. I guess that joke was symptomatic of a tendency that, over time, makes me not want to read him. Yeah, he's funny, but the jokes usually don't go anyplace. And the larger issue for me is, I don't sense much passion for movies when I read his criticism. He seems to present himself as above being really moved by films (positively or negatively). I don't get that same impression from his stuff on literature, though. It's almost as if, reading Lane, we've hopped in a time machine and gone back to when movies were considered a vulgar and inferior art form, good for a chuckle and not much else.
mutinyco says: "Ultimately, for me, it comes down to 2 things. The first is that I probably couldn't have been a filmmaker today if it wasn't for digital -- I'm able to shoot, edit, and release online because of it. And second, I recall I conversation I had with John Carpenter a few years ago where he flat out said how lucky kids of today are to have digital to work with -- and ultimately what matters is telling a good story."
Yeah, I agree with you on all those points. I still wish video looked as beautiful as film, though, and I'll be sad when it's gone.
You didn't crack down on Lane too hard. It's not possible. He's Bosley Crowther all over again.
The New Yorker should trade Lane to Talibanistan and use the crazy Christian convert guy with his green Bible to review the pictures.
Amen.
I just happened to catch part of "Brazil" on cable today. An astounding film that gets richer with each viewing. The slackening in the third act bothers me less over time, maybe because the ending is so horrifying. Feeney nails it when he points out that in essence there is no obvious "bad guy" in "Brazil," and that's what gives the fantasy a core of relevance, even realism. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy, even when they're torturing a poor bureaucrat for no reason.
Speaking of links, I'm a bit curious: What in bloody heck is going on over at the Press? Did they hire a chimp as a copy editor? Both yours and Armond's reviews over the past several weeks have read like they've been run through the woodchipper that Steve Buscemi faced at the end of Fargo. Choppy punctuation, typos, tons of paragraphs that consist of one sentence, plot synopsis that reads like watered-down Lou Lumenick... clearly not what a longtime reader has come to expect. I read it online and at first I was wondering if whoever put up the web page put the paragraph breaks in the wrong spots, but it's become consistently garbled, and having your blog writing to compare, it seems all too obvious that somebody over there is fucking up a good thing. What's the deal?
I agree wholeheartedly about the various comments in this post, particularly in regards to A. Lane, whose "witty" obvservations are continual evidence he religiously avoids writing anything of import. The Christopher Plummer line, in particular, made my skin crawl -- proof that his mind is anything but engaged with the matters at hand.
Pedro: They're trying to break the film section into more bite-sized nuggets. It's the way of the world. Armond and I still get about 1200 words apiece, but it's not all lumped together anymore -- they spread it out over a whole section, so neither of us write segues anymore, there's no point. Typos or grammar problems are totally me and Armond's fault, since they don't have factcheckers anymore (every deadline writer's best friend) and the copy editors are way slammed (too much copy, not enough people). I wouldn't presume to complain about any of this, since the paper has been fighting the good fight against the Voice forever, and they're more understaffed now than at any point in my memory.
PS -- Oddly, Lane is sometimes capable of insightful writing about actual filmmaking (i.e., what's onscreen, rather than the cast, the script, etc) but for whatever reason he rarely does it. Years ago Godfrey Cheshire wrote a really angry takedown of Lane in NYPress that I thought was exaggerated. Over time I've come to mostly agree with it. I don't think Lane really loves cinema or thinks it's worth getting worked up over. He just likes going to movies and talking about them. Of the two, Denby's a much more thoughtful critic, though he's been hit and miss in recent years and needs to throw more grenades.
I don't see the point in getting riled up about Lane. It's like people think he's trying to write serious criticism and failing. You may prefer your J-Ho or J-Ro or whoever, but it's not as if using movies as a means of tossing off a series of bons mots is inherently an affront. It'd make about as much sense to get all pissy about Libby Gelman-Waxner.
Since Libby-Gelman Waxner is a fictional character, could you elaborate on that comparison a little bit? I'm intrigued. If I were going to defend lane, I am not sure that's the approach I would choose.
I just don't think there's much point in judging him by the standards of film criticism when it seems fairly clear to me that he has very little interest in being a critic. I enjoy (some of) his "reviews" in roughly the same way that I imagine I might have enjoyed reading, say, James Thurber riffing on some Preminger or Wyler flick. It's a droll comedy routine. Which, sure, fine, be irritated that the New Yorker cedes its film-review space to that sort of thing every other week. But Lane is exceedingly good at what he does, and is not even really trying to do what everybody accuses him of failing at. Is my point.
PS -- Truth be told, I think part of my irritation comes from the fact that he's filling half a post that was vacated by Pauline Kael, who was genuinely funny and exciting but also managed some astute creative and sociological insights almost every week. Plus she could be agreeably batshit, and she was a provocateur. Every month or so she'd lob a hand grenade into the middle of movie culture and watch people scatter. I feel like Denby and Lane are Pauline Kael split in half. The scholar and the jester. Kael, for all her faults and tics, was both.
You're right that he is good at what he does. But don't you think he's capable of much more than he shows us?
But don't you think he's capable of much more than he shows us?
Probably. But I'm not gonna get actively angry at the guy just for being complacent.
Look, I wouldn't rank Anthony Lane among my 20 favorite contemporary critics. But nothing he writes is half as irksome to me as the self-righteous attacks of folks like "anonymous" above. It's as if some people want to use Lane's evident lack of passion for cinema as a way of touting their own bona fides. Good for you, buddy.
I saw Funny Ha Ha yesterday, and, knowing only that it was made on a tiny budget, had assumed that it was shot on digital. As soon as I started the DVD and saw that Bujalski had shot on film, it was almost like an immediate, visceral shock. I'm so used to digital harshness being part of the current indie aesthetic that it made the film seem to me the product of an earlier era, like a long-lost early John Sayles movie or something. It honestly contributed greatly to my appreciation for the film, even though in theory it shouldn't make much of a difference. The more prevalent digital becomes, the more that shooting on film will become an artistic choice, I think, like shooting in black and white, and we'll probably appreciate it more the less common it is.
Also, I totally laughed at Lane's Christopher Plummer joke, and even repeated it to my sister, a huge Sound of Music fan.
josh: Well, if it works, it works.
M'da wrote: Look, I wouldn't rank Anthony Lane among my 20 favorite contemporary critics. But nothing he writes is half as irksome to me as the self-righteous attacks of folks like "anonymous" above. It's as if some people want to use Lane's evident lack of passion for cinema as a way of touting their own bona fides. Good for you, buddy.
I've managed to irritate the irritable Mike D'Angelo. Sorry. But dude, is Lane your boyfriend or something; cause you seem unusually tortured about him -- one minute he's Libby-Gelman Waxner, the next, fucking Thurber...? Give us a break. See your shrink.
But I'm relieved Lane made D'Angelo's exalted #21 position in mainstream criticism. For his funnyness. Go on I'd like to hear some more about this rubber chicken school of film crit.
In case you need to reality check, Joan Acocella is a great critic. Lester Bangs was a great critic. Lane is a glib, lazy mooncalf.
My complaint with the digitalization of film is with the filmmakers themselves who seem to be content using digital video not as a separate and distinctly different aesthetic worthy of experimentation and examination, but to merely produce saccherine versions of Hollywood products. Often only a quick way into "The Biz". I am speaking here of the type of camera included in the "Prosumer" class, of which that Panasonic 100 (currently in its "B" series) is but one, and Soderberg's beloved Canon. By the way, that Pansonic is in no way a match for 35mm film. How dare Smith make such a casually uniformed statement. Given the level of his ignorance, it's easy to see why his own movies lack any kind of visual appeal, whatsoever.
KJ: Yeah, I know what you mean. "Home" was shot with an XL-1S and a couple of XL-1's and lit mostly with store-bought bulbs inside Chinese lanterns, and we intentionally did things that pushed the Mini-DV image about as far as it could go -- shooting high contrast, doing silhouettes and frames within frames, slow pans and zooms, that kind of stuff. I'm pleased with the result -- it's good looking considering the materials -- and the fact is, given the fact that we had 40 speaking parts and nobody got paid for their time, we pretty much had to go mini-DV and multicamera, otherwise we'd still be shooting it. But if I had the money and time, of course I would have shot on Super 16mm or 35mm or High Def, because there's more resolution in the image, which really helps sell the wide shots. (I love wide shots and do quite a lot of them for a Mini-DV film, but of course when you see it on a big screen, those are the shots where you're most aware that it's video, because the details break up and you see the pixels.)
Obviously it's all about the aesthetic, and if you're doing something interesting that holds people's attention, the choice of format doesn't matter. Most documentaries these days are shot on video, and most people don't mind if it's a well told story -- though I have to admit, one of the reasons I liked THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON and the very good music documentary HOMEMADE HILLBILLY JAM so much is because they were shot on Super 16, and the detail and color gradation really brings everything to another level.
Hi Def is almost there. The bowling documentary A LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN was shot on Hi Def, as was the Van Peebles biopic PANTHER, and both of those look quite lovely.
PS -- The sci fi short I'm working on now will be shot on Super 16mm. I am already stockpiling film stock. Seeing all those little metal canisters piled on my bookshelf gives me a rush.
I haven't seen "Inside Man", but my guess is that if it were a better movie, or if Plummer were better in it, then Anthony Lane wouldn't make "Sound of Music" jokes. Think about a movie with the occasional visible microphone or the wristwatch that disappears between shots. If the movie's good enough, the audience doesn't notice, or, if it notices, doesn't care.
In case you need to reality check, Joan Acocella is a great critic. Lester Bangs was a great critic.
Hey, remember when I said, repeatedly, that to the extent that I enjoy Lane it's for his skills as a humorist and not as a critic? That was awesome.
Here's Owen Gleiberman's Entertainment Weekly review of "V for Vendetta." He gives it a bit of a spanking.
Fyi: Mike....
Nobody's Perfect - The Anthony Lane Story
or a plea for Lane to commit public suicide.
Anthony Lane has been a FILM CRITIC for The New Yorker since January, 1993. (Dude, they claim here that Nathan "funny man" Lane is actually one a them film critics, not a humorist.)
Lane began writing book reviews for The Independent at the time of its launch, in October, 1986. As a freelance writer, he contributed to other English newspapers, including the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph. He became deputy literary editor of The Independent in 1989 and one year later was appointed film critic for the new Independent on Sunday. (Bully for you, old man, but do you have the least idea about film....? It was either second string lit crit and having to hold James Wood's coat or getting foisted on the colonials for a bit of clueless film snobbery...decisions, decisions)
In 2001, Lane’s reviews were awarded the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. His writing for The New Yorker is collected in a book, “Nobody’s Perfect.” (A suspiciously apologetic title, don't you think..? I prefer "Nobody's Film Literate" as a more accurate one)
Lane received his undergraduate English degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also did graduate work on T. S. Eliot. (Does he dare to eat a peach..?) He divides his time between London and New York. (and he multiplies his word count by filling his pages with gongoric phrases that sound like Christopher Plummer himself might be "uttering" them at any moment)
Dude, they claim here that Nathan "funny man" Lane is actually one a them film critics, not a humorist.
"They" also claim that Ethan Hawke plays a supporting role in Training Day. He doesn't. What's your point?
What I think our friend The Enchanted Mitten is forgetting here is that -- at least in my experience running a suburban art-house theater for the past eight years -- a New Yorker review can still pretty much make or break a movie when it comes to a certain clientle. (At my place we basically we cater to older, moneyed folks with "no blood for oil" bumperstickers on their SUVs.)
That New Yorker masthead still carries a lot of water in these circles, which is why I've always been perplexed as to how Lane -- who really doesn't seem to think much of movies in general, though he's an admittedly funny bastard -- gets such an important post.
I'm also quite frequently guilty of padding a word count with dumb gags when I've got nothing much to say about a flick, but I'm shocked that even Lane found it necessary with INSIDE MAN -- which I caught this weekend and found to be one of the richest and most interesting mainstream popcorn flicks to come around in a long time.
I think what Mike's trying to say is that regardless of how Lane is marketed by his various publishers, he's ultimately more a humorist than a critic. Therefore, we should judge him by what he obviously is, and what he seems comfortable being, not by what his bosses claim he is, or what some of his fans seem to think he is. Thus the Thurber and Gelman-Waxner comparisons.
Am I right, Mike?
Now on to Sean, who makes my point better than I managed to. I don't care how funny Lane is (damned funny) or how good a writer he is (pretty amazing, actually) or how sharp his writing on books and other cultural barometers can be (very, very sharp). Fact is, he doesn't seem to care about movies except as things to riff on and sometimes make fun of. Sometimes he just doesn't seem that interested in actually writing about the filmmaking, the various social or political ramifications of the movie, or anything else, he just wants to make puns and jokes and various asides. I mean, Owen Gleiberman is a really funny critic, and he writes fora mass market publication funded by the mother of all media congolmerate; his word count is severely constrained, and there are certain movies (mostly really small movies) that he can't even get clearance to review. But despite these constraints, he takes movies very seriously, and even when he's funny, he's serious. (I don't agree with him much these days, but that's a whole other issue.) Yet Lane, who has what appears to be ample space and (I assume) equal or greater freedom, is mainly interested in being witty.
As Sean says, the New Yorker is arguably the most important film section in the country for a certain clientele (i.e., the middle to upper class person who sees a few movies a year and tells his friends who don't go to movies what they ought to go see). These are the people, like it or not, who make the difference between mainstream press attention and none, between extra weeks or extra theaters and none. Aside from the New York Times, no publication is more influential at writing the first draft of a movie's history. The question posed here is, are you comfortable with that first draft of history being written by a humorist rather than a critic?
I know I'm asking for trouble by throwing stones here, because I certainly have been known to meander and crack wise in my own reviews, and on the serious critic scale, if there is such a thing, I fall well below most of the people I consider "serious" critics (Hoberman, Rosenbaum, my colleague at the Press, to name just three). And I certainly didn't intend to make this thread an anti-Lane jihad, but what the fuck. It's an important conversation, because it leads us to the question of how important movies are, and how important criticism is, and whether the entire medium is even worth the bother of having a conversation like this.
Matt, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you just said. I just think that anger/concern, while justifiable and maybe even productive, is misplaced when it's directed at Lane personally, rather than at the New Yorker editor(s) who installed him in that spot. (Even then, they do alternate him with a real critic. Not that that makes certain folks much happier, but let's not even get into the whole Denby-wouldn't-know-Hou-or-Tarr-if-he-tripped-over-them thing.)
An orgy of agreement! Look, why blame the poor editors, let's blame the central committee at Conde Nast, etc...
For me, it's a matter of personal integrity. Lane endorses the checks that he deposits for his work as a "film critic" -- leaving aside for the moment his alleged drollery -- when clearly the man would be happier elsewhere, and is probably burned out.
The fact that they continue to have Lane there, I think reflects correctly the contempt and ignorance that the bulk of New Yorker readership (hey, and the rest of America for that matter) has for film as an art. Granted, great film critics are scarce in any generation. But I think that it's always a disaster to try to import a Frankenstein critic from outside the world of film.
Film critics, at least in America, are unusually irrelevant in this particular moment - and the New Yorker does bear a lot of the burden here because of it's traditional status as a cultural Hindenburg (big, windy, modernist, a showpiece, and fragile) for the rest of the country, so with that in mind...
The ideal New Yorker film critic should be:
1. Not parochial or dogmatic, like Fred Camper.
2. A cinephile, like Dave K or Sarris.
2. Keenly aware that film is fundamentally globalized, both corporate and not, and multi-media, like Jonathan R. or any of the Movie Mutations gang.
3, A stylist. Entertaining, witty, and sophisticated, the usual NYker attributes.
4. Now even more so than ever, both a gadfly, a spur, and a teacher. Someone with passion.
5. Willing to blog.
So given the above stipulations -- there are only two guys in my view who really fit the bill: Our buddy Armond, and Stuart Klawans. And I'm open to other names for this game, too...
The other interesting approach would be to hire somebody smart from the industry, an insider who understands production, give him a ghostwriter and let him rip.
Dunno about that industry insider suggestion. I think you might get the continuation of Lane by other means. But I like all the other names on your list. And I'd add a couple of wild cards: Walter Chaw and Manohla Dargis.
I don't know why Denby's getting a free pass here: he's a very, very limited bourgeois critic and CANNOT DEAL with political themes or slightly unusual editing, etc., schemes.
I have great affection for Denby because I grew up reading him in New York magazine, which my mom subscribed to in Dallas. And I think he was quite good in his first few years at The New Yorker. You're right that he's more interested in literary/theatrical values rather than visual/technical concerns, but that's true of most critics at his level of influence. He's also been off his game in recent years, but if you've followed his personal life (chronicled in his own books, and in his ex-wife's writing as well) you know why. He's not a particularly fun read, but I have learned from him. But I opened this can of worms, so I don't begrudge you for digging into it.
Did somebody just suggest that Armond White is not dogmatic?! I'll believe that the moment he gives a negative review to Spielberg or Chereau.
M'da wrote: Did somebody just suggest that Armond White is not dogmatic?! I'll believe that the moment he gives a negative review to Spielberg or Chereau.
There IS a difference between a dogmatic approach and a politique. It's subtle, but a difference nonetheless. One day, Mike, you may figure it out. Best of luck.
Gee, thanks. I'm sure your condescension will be a big help. {Rolls eyes.}
Now might be a good time for Mr. Cheshire to revisit some of the predictions in the article you link to. The concern that tips off the piece (what we thought in 1999 to be the imminent conversion of film projection systems to digital projection systems) still has not occurred on any large scale nearly seven years later. Ironically, the proximate cause of the revolution that wasn’t was probably Hollywood’s misplaced hyper-anxiety about piracy.
But now that theater attendance seems to be in steady decline, it’s hard to imagine that many theater chains will be all that eager to plunk down the cash it will take to overhaul the heart of their operations. Plus, with the advent of cheap digital projectors that many chains already use to show those obnoxious “pre-show” commercial reels, many theaters can already exhibit the “television at the movie theater” programming about which Mr. Cheshire seemed particularly concerned. (But will anybody go? I went to a Regal theater last week that was showing a “special” presentation of the new Beastie Boys concert DVD. Didn’t look like people were knocking down doors to get in.) These projectors are just fine for other television-like programming, but certainly not capable of the quality that people expect when they go to see a movie.
So from where I stand, it seems like we could be in a long period of tenuous co-existence with movie houses continuing to exhibit movies via 35mm projection while experimenting with other programming via cheap digital projection. The real revolution, meanwhile, will take place in the home.
JRE--You may be right about a period of coexistence, mainly because theatrical exhibition is hurting right now, and they simply can't afford a wholesale changeover to digital.
Jeremiah Kipp has interviewed Godfrey Cheshire, and I am told that a good part of their discussion is a reconsideration and update of Cheshire's "Death of Film/Decay of Cinema" two-parter. I'll post it on this site when Jeremiah thinks it's ready to be published.
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