Phone screens a fine replacement for the big screen when on the go.
WHY IT’S NOT SO BAD TO WATCH A MOVIE ON YOUR PHONE AFTER ALL
When I first moved to Toronto, going on five years ago now, I got a job in business-to-business sales at an office in North York, near where Weston road meets the 401. I lived downtown, almost directly across from Rogers Centre, and I did not own a car. So I was obliged to endure an interminable public transit commute: 40 minutes by bus, from Dee Avenue to Royal York Station, and another 45 by train, including a transfer southward at St. George. That is an hour and a half every morning and an hour and a half every night — assuming there were no delays, and there were always delays.
It was exactly enough time to watch a movie. That was the notion that occupied my thoughts. I aspired to quit my office job to write about film, and here I was squandering a double- bill’s worth of movie-going time each day interned in some dreary limbo. (I am a voracious reader, but trust me when I say that after 10 hours of boilerroom North York sales furor, I could muster neither the energy nor the inclination needed to crack a hardcover spine on the tube.) Fed up with staring blankly into the subway’s middle- distance, I resolved to do what I’d long believed unthinkable: I started watching movies on my phone.
This practice had seemed objectionable to me not so much out of some abiding distaste as by an overwhelm- ing sense that it was wrong in much the way it would be to converse loudly in a theatre or watch a foreignl anguage film dubbed in English. It is a basic principle of the cinema that movies ought to be enjoyed in the dark, in silence, on the biggest screen available: in a movie theatre, ideally, or in a home theatre which boasts an ambience that affects the conditions of a real one as best it can. The context is not arbitrary. There is a particular, meaningful way that movies are meant to be seen.
And yet in desperation I surrendered to need. I began tentatively, with a film I had seen many, many times before: The Palm Beach Story, the breathless 1940s screwball by Preston Sturges, starring Joel McCrea and Claudia Colbert. The film, I found, was sturdy enough to withstand the sustained assault of its hostile new surroundings; its comic genius, monumental on the silver screen, was not diminished to me in the slightest on this six- inch scale. The only trouble I had was with the sporadic fits of laughter I felt compelled by transit etiquette to repress. ( And as it happened I proved unable.) Of course I would have preferred to bask in the Palm Beach Story’s ample splendour in the comfort of, say, the TIFF Bell Lightbox — somewhere near the middle-front, with a bag of popcorn in my hands, and nobody tall sitting between myself and the screen. But an ideal is not always possible. And usually the next best thing will do.
Next day I tested a theory, galvanized by the success of my trial. I watched Sidney Lumet’s classic courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, an exemplar of creative form and editing, certain that how the movie was staged, shot, and cut together would impress itself on me all the more from the narrow dimensions of a phone. The rhythm of the montage, the arc from long shots toward close- ups, I expected the phone would manifest. Sure enough, that’s what I saw.
We t e nd to t hi nk of watching a movie on a phone as a kind of reduct i on, because something meant to be colossal has been scaled down to a rectangle that fits in your pocket. But we forget there’s also an expansion taking place: that phone i s only a few inches from your eyes, close enough to shut out so much of what’s around you; compared to the distance from the screen one typically sits at the theatre — quite far, especially for those who favour the back row — watching on the phone seems very close indeed.
That intimacy, I found, was immersive in a way that even the best home theatre never is, and the cinema itself only rarely. It made for a movie- watching experience that was uncommonly immediate and satisfyingly direct.
Some movies, I found, did not lend themselves so well to this kind of closeness and size. I had no luck with The Dark Knight. The resolution of its immaculate IMAX images doesn’t make much sense on such a screen, and its palette was too grim. Ditto art- anthropology epic Samsara and Jacques Tati’s incomparably vast Playtime. But I did find that movies whose prevailing key was minor, movies of simple interests and a modest scale, could be enjoyed no less on my languorous subway rides than on the most dazzling multiplex screen. I learned in the end to rebuff the accepted wisdom that watching a movie on a phone is a disgrace.
There are pleasures to be had engaging with the cinema in t his way. We shouldn’t f eel commute-viewing is really so bad.
(A LONG COMMUTE) IS EXACTLY ENOUGH TIME TO WATCH A MOVIE.