Cinema is changing, so are we

This column is published under the rubric “new movies,” which is both a nod to a previous feature in these pages — one that listed the new movies opening in Arkansas theaters in a given week — and a playful acknowledgment that they aren’t making movies like they used to.

In the past few years we’ve had to re-consider what movies are — largely because we’ve started consuming them in different ways. A movie can have its premiere in the palm of your hand these days.

We were moving toward changing our approach even before the pandemic shut down our now semi-re-opened theatrical venues. Some things have likely changed forever; before the pandemic, “Coming 2 America” was going to have a theatrical run. It’s now showing exclusively on Amazon Prime.

Disney’s “Raya and the Dragon” is in real theaters today; but if you prefer and have a subscription to Disney +, you can watch it at home. “Boogie” is, as far as I know, exclusively in theaters this week — no doubt you’ll be able to find it on a streaming service soon.

And there are a whole slew of movies opening on streaming services and that are available via video on demand — far too many for us to try to cover every week. In a way, this is liberating; we can choose what we write about without feeling compelled to do the impossible. In another way, it’s extraordinarily frustrating.

We find ourselves spending more and more of our time researching the logistics of movie-watching — where can you see it, how much might it cost, will the publicist please send us a link for review, how do we make the review link work, where can we get some hi-res art (sorry, no that format doesn’t work for us, we need a .jpg ) — and less and less of it actually writing about the content of the movies we do review each week.

I know, it’s tough all over. So part of what this column means to do is to keep you guys — you readers, that self-selected elite who still make newspapers viable — aware of what we’re doing, trying to do and sometimes failing to do.

For instance, we won’t have a review of “Chaos Walking” in this section, even though it opens today and is, in some quarters, a long-awaited film. It’s not really anyone’s fault (the studio is supplying us with a review screener) it’s just arriving after our deadlines. Because our deadlines are earlier than most publications these days because we are producing a more ambitious product — a feature section devoted to the movies that we actually spend some time planning and designing. I’m just the front man in this band, and like a lot of front men, I just prance around and sing my silly songs while the people who really know how to play their instruments keep the beat and hold everything together.

Anyway, my sense is that “Chaos Walking” is probably not as big a deal as everybody thought it might be back when it was first announced. It was mostly shot in 2017, and it was supposed to premiere theatrically in March 2019, but got pulled back because test audiences didn’t respond well to it, necessitating some re-shoots. Then the pandemic got in the way. So it’s coming out now.

A sci-fi action film based on a young adult novel starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, directed

by Doug Liman, sounds like a pretty high profile release to me, but I’m not sure Lionsgate has that much confidence in it. I guess we’ll see — next week.

I’d also like to call your attention to a couple of other small tweaks we’re making in the section — this week we’re reviewing a film book, Ben Beard’s “The South Never Plays Itself: A Film Buff’s Journey Through the South on Screen.” In a week or two, I’m planning to review David Thomson’s “A Light in the Darkness: A History of Movie Directors” in these pages.

As some of you know, I’ve been reviewing books for longer than I’ve been reviewing movies, and while we run a regular book review column in our Sunday Style section, I’ve always wanted to review more books than our space has allowed. I don’t know why I didn’t think of writing about movie books in this section before.

Finally, I want to draw a little attention to the video OnFilm we “produce” (basically I turn a camera on and talk) each week. They tell me it takes about two years for features like this to catch on, and we’re only coming up on our first anniversary, but I think our soft-opening period is over.

This week on the video, I discuss a recent poll of the best films of the 1980s that was conducted by Jordan Ruimy, the editor-in-chief of worldofreel.com. He polled about 200 film critics and other movie professionals, including me.