Small Is Beautiful
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Small Is Beautiful You lose some effects, but keep the story, in portable moviegoing. BY JOHN PODHORETZ For a while, movie theaters were getting better. After decades in which the...
...The peerless advantage of watching a movie in a dark theater is that, assuming there isn’t a teenager texting right next to you, there is nothing extraneous to distract your attention...
...If, on the other hand, you’re watching McLintock!, a revolting 1963 Western comedy in which, for the 85th time in their sorry careers, John Wayne saves his diffi cult marriage to Maureen O’Hara by taking her over his knee and giving her a good spanking, you will only wish, as I did, that the screen were the size of a subatomic particle...
...Call it portable moviegoing...
...The Second Golden Age of the Movie Palace came to an end in 2005...
...They designed lavish multiplexes with beautiful lobbies, decent sound systems, and chairs that rocked...
...And it is...
...The iPod is vastly superior to the old portable black-and-white television, needless to say...
...Moviemakers labor for hours to get the look of a scene exactly right, and all that effort would surely be lost at a width of two inches and a height of an inch-and-a-half...
...And if a homeless guy comes through asking you to help him in the name of Jesus, you can turn right back to the iPod, confi dent he will pass you by...
...The iPod is something one carries, after all, and that means even in the time it takes for a blink or a quick eye rub, the background will shift, even a tiny bit...
...And now, 20 years after the beginning of the construction boom, there are signs of creeping decrepitude...
...At the time the device made its debut, it was the subject of loud howls from cin?astes and movie directors, who described it as the death of cinema...
...I gather the picture is better and larger on the iPhone...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...The sound is extraordinary and the picture is beautiful to look at...
...We did not have a color television in our house until 1970, which meant that before then I had no idea, during the fi ve times I saw The Wizard of Oz in its annual broadcast, that Kansas was in black-and-white while Oz was in color...
...If those work, the movie works, at 40 feet wide or at two inches wide...
...the movie turns into a radio show for a moment as you survey the other passengers...
...Say you’re watching a bad or boring movie on a subway train, a movie you nonetheless want to get to the end of...
...So what is a movie watcher to do...
...As always, what matters most is not the peripheral issues of a fi lm—the color palette of its cinematography, the whizbang special effects, the editing—but the essentials of story, character, and dialogue...
...That can pull you out of the story you’re watching...
...Screens are fraying and graying...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ For a while, movie theaters were getting better...
...Building led to overbuilding...
...The sound, once crisp, is now merely loud...
...Comfortable seats are lumpy and getting lumpier...
...Which brings up an odd advantage...
...A distraction or two is not a bad thing...
...But the lack of visual scale certainly did not prevent those of us who grew up watching blackandwhite televisions, the smaller versions of which had screens fi ve inches in diagonal and the broadcast quality of whose images was often wretched, from falling in love with movies...
...The obvious answer is to stay home, where the qualitative improvements— plasma and LCD televisions up to eight feet wide, with remarkable sound and picture—are far more transformative than the changes to theaters...
...I have spent the last two years watching movies on treadmills and Stairmasters, subways and buses, and in a queue at the Motor Vehicles Bureau or an airport security line on a video iPod I received as a birthday present from my wife...
...After decades in which the grand palaces were either allowed to run down into rot or torn down entirely, while new venues were slapped together in strip malls and confi gured in odd and distressing shapes, companies like Cineplex Odeon and National Amusements went on building sprees...
...Theater owners trumpet the arrival of digital projection to lure customers, but it turns out that digital projection is more valuable for the industry than it is for the viewer...
...But if one is not at home, and is tired of getting seasick in a broken movie theater rocker, there is the third option, and the only one that is entirely new...
...Which did not save me from suffering through fl ying-monkey nightmares, or my siblings from suffering through my pained efforts to mimic the dulcet sounds of the Lollipop Guild...
...What is defi antly peculiar about the experience of watching a movie on the iPod has far less to do with the minuscule size of the screen than the fact that one rarely watches it from a fi xed vantage point...
...Studios will not have to produce costly prints on fi lm, which is nice for them, but the picture on display is nowhere near as sharp...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 11
