IPad Theater
Iwatched on my iPad at work.
In the middle of the day. In the middle of the newsroom. Nobody said anything to me. I was working.
I understand how weird my job is, but it’s my reality. From now until the end of the year I’ll be watching a lot of movies. I need to get most of my movie viewing done by Dec. 7, because this year the Southeastern Film Critics Association has decided we need to vote on Dec. 8. The idea is that we can get our poll out ahead of some of the other polls and maybe we’ll get more media attention.
More attention might mean more movie studios will take notice of us and we’ll end up getting access to more movies in the year’s final quarter. Which is especially good for film critics like me who live and work in places where the studios no longer hold weekly screenings of soon-toopen movies.
Access to more movies means more opportunity to write about movies. More movies means more movie-watching experience, which can make you better at thinking and writing about movies. I’m generally in favor of anything that brings opportunities to see more movies.
On the other hand, Dec. 8 is way too early to vote on what the best movies of a given year are. When I was president of SEFCA for a few years, I always wanted to vote as late as possible, to give more members more chances to see as many movies as possible. I got some pushback from the early voting faction, so we generally voted in mid-December, usually the weekend before Christmas. My calculus was that no one was going to pay that much attention to us anyway—no matter what we did, no one was ever going to mistake a bunch of mostly online movie reviewers based in the Southern U.S. for the National Board of Review or the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—so why not give ourselves more time to see more movies? After all, there are always a few releases that aren’t made available to anyone until mid- or late December; no matter when we vote, there are always movies that most of our members won’t have an opportunity to see.
At the same time, I honestly don’t care that much about these sort of polls. My ballot is just a snapshot of what I was thinking at the moment I filled it out. Last year, I picked Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma as my No. 1 film, but I am not prepared to argue that it’s a better film than Paul Schrader’s
First Reformed or Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters.
I’m not interested in ranking movies, in saying that any particular film is better than any other particular film. I’m most interested in the way that movies can transmit ideas and experiences and how they are received in the ultimate private theater all of us carry around with us in our heads.
Nobody ever sees the same movie as anyone else. And nobody sees the same movie twice. Because the circumstances are always different, because we are evolving creatures. The
Rosemary’s Baby you watched when you were a 9-year-old is obviously not the same Rosemary’s Baby you watched in your 50s. Because you’re not the same after everything you’ve experienced.
An adult watching Rosemary’s
Baby might know quite a lot about Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow and the satanic panic of the 1980s and early ’90s. An adult watching
Rosemary’s Baby will likely know that Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of Charles Manson’s cult about a year after the
film was released.
Movies, like all works of art, acquire a patina of associations over the years as they interact with the wider culture. That’s one reason a lot of us like to think of them as living things, capable of changing and growing and meaning different things to different people at different times of their lives.
Writing about art is useful because it exercises certain thinking muscles, because it allows us to work through the artist’s motives and intentions. But no review is definitive. Our opinions and tastes evolve. We learn things, we live through stuff, our perspectives shift.
In some ways we might become more discerning; if you see five movies in a theater every year you’re likely to have a much different take than if you see 250 or more. Most movies are designed as entertainment products for a certain kind of movie-goer who may (or may not) be very sophisticated.
As many movies as I’ve watched in my life (and there were many years when I saw more than 250 new films), I’m not that wellversed on the sort of superhero movies that Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Alan Moore and others have recently weighed in on. While I’m sympathetic to Scorsese’s view—I love the cinema of the ’70s, and most comic book movies bore me, especially in their third acts—I understand that at least some of their resistance to what seems to us as big commercial kabuki shows is rooted in nostalgia.
There are lots of people who can read these movies better, who have the knowledge and passion to write intelligently about them. One reason I like reading about superhero movies more than I like sitting through them is because the writers are describing different, far more interesting movies than the ones I’ve seen (or, more often these days, haven’t seen yet).
Todd Phillips would probably not like it that I’m watching his movie Joker on my iPad, in a busy newsroom where I’m occasionally interrupted by colleagues. (So hey dude, maybe lobby Warner Bros. to screen their movies for us podunk critics?) But this is how I’m experiencing it, and how I’ll experience most movies going forward. Because things change.
Joker is impressive—more impressive than I thought it would be, given that I’ve read a lot about it—and Joaquin Phoenix is such a committed and intelligent actor that I’ll watch him in anything. I might write about the film at some point. But is it a Top 10 film of 2019 or an Oscar contender?
Who cares? Next up on the iPad: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book.