The world crashes in, into my living room

"Do you like that movie?"

What's a good, sincere response to that question? Depends on the movie obviously. Depends on who's asking too. Depends on my mood. There's a million factors resulting in a million answers, but there was always one standard reply that was the most honest and most explanatory and it is now almost entirely Out Of Order.

"I'll watch it if it's on..."

A perfectly poetic shorthand used to describe 75% of Cinema, indicating that "yes, I enjoy being in the company of that movie, if it happens to be in my presence." And it wasn't any form of placation; countless films that I thought were alright but the mandatory companionship of TV's warm, glowing, warming glow would disperse them into my atmosphere to the point that over time, I may like them, loathe them, or love them. 

This isn't how art should work, this is how art does work. You can take your hot takes to the judge and plead temporary stupidity because no one cares about your partially formed opinion. It takes an individual made of sterner stuff to watch Young Einstein or Clifford 25 times and think "y'know, this is pretty good!" It's like radio, and before long you're hooked on a feeling. That's not to say that repetition decidedly leads to adoration (or even appreciation) but it was, at least for me, a luxury; a real blessing to peripherally reevaluate through reruns, but more than anything (and I mean anything) television was the outlet for discovery. More than movie theaters, home video, or digital streaming, regularly scheduled TV programming was a gift wrapped surprise at any given glance. I can't count the amount of movies I fell for simply because they were, in fact, on at the right time: Bound, Cobra, Beetlejuice, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, The In-Laws, The Exorcist, and The Conversation are just a small fraction of the notable knockouts that went out of their way to find me. 

On the surface, one could ask "Who cares? How's that much different than the way it works today?" The irony, I feel, is that the way it used to be was actually easier - not a claim often made about old practices, especially with technology. But that's not what they would have you believe; the foundation of every consumer empire from McDonald's to Amazon has been "affordability and convenience" and we buy into that bullshit to the point that we're left without any more choices. And that's the gag: these corporations pride themselves in selling us endless options, except they're not endless and they've got us glued to the ground. But I'm overshooting my point - it's not just all these evil companies that destroyed the joy of channel surfing for gold on a Saturday afternoon. Even just the regular old video stores that boomed in the 80s could be blamed for further enforcing the burden put in place by the multiplex: commitment. 

Yes it's true, online shopping (and dining and everything else) prompted streaming companies - all of them - to inflate their "libraries" as a response to the obvious demand that folks don't wanna go anywhere or do anything. Easy enough when Comcast buys Universal and Disney buys Fox and Marvel, but Netflix suddenly and swiftly began to manufacture original content to beef up their bogus burger to meet the need of the stay-at-home public. As a result, new movies and shows were greenlit and rushed into production and released off the assembly line to a passive public; artistic integrity and discretion were largely disregarded in lieu of quantity over quality. That's not subjective opinion, that's mathematical fact: Netflix is serving rancid leftovers and undercooked chicken on a silver platter and there's enough of it to last our lifetime (as long as you skip the intros and end credits). But this isn't about the quality of the crap we're shackled with, it's about the quantity. Poring over mountains of unrefined garbage isn't easier or more convenient as intended, not to me. If anything, it creates unneeded anxiety in a situation that's designed to provide comfort.

Physically I don't hafta go out to the theater or the video store or even to my disc playing device, I can just scroll for days, and that's presumably the desired scenario set forth by the business casual bozos who pretended they were doing us a favor. You ever found yourself browsing this nonsense for like an hour? Even if you find something good, something you know, something new that looks interesting, you keep browsing because the stress and effort it takes to commit is far more grueling than putting on my shoes and going down to Cinemaworld and choosing between 7 pieces of shit rather than 7,000. What if I make the wrong choice? What if it's not what I was in the mood for? What if it sucks? Do I waste 140 minutes? Is it unfair to turn it off prematurely? Then I'll have wasted 20 minutes and I'm right back where I started. I have shelves of physical movies and shows that I actually do like and I can waste a whole evening trying to decide before I give up and go to bed. A wider selection was never the answer. Yeah the format prompted a buncha new bullshit but it's balanced out by The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy, and dozens of off-center channels that advocate the good, the great, and the weird. And so there is room for discovery, but you need to look for it, and then choose, and then settle. 

This isn't me just rejecting modernity in some knee-jerk fashion, I don't do that. It's the act of searching, then assessing through a brief synopsis, runtime, year of release, and some absentee critical star rating that makes the difference. To stumble upon a gem at 12am and find yourself overcome with the euphoric wonder of "What is this?" is miles away from the comfortable preparation and casual calculation of selecting something to accommodate your "movie night." In the end, the result is the same: there, you've seen it. But I've always held a torch for the journey over the destination, and that's the part that always gets fucked with over time: the means of experience. I didn't discover The Beatles because they were "suggested" to me by a robot, but the outcome would have remained the same. A chance encounter that feels like love at first sight could end up in a relationship that lasts as long as with a companion you meet in an online dating site. I can analogize it a hundred different ways and all the dolts and dunces will hear is "I used to hafta hunt & kill and my nourishment was that much more satisfying because I knew I'd earned it." They can minimize my observation to fit their agenda all they want, but if they held any stock in curiosity, adventure, or critical Film analysis they'd appreciate the value of embarking into Saturday Afternoon Programming and finding yourself following Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg from the future on a killing spree and wondering "Where is this going?! This is fantastic!" It'd be more exciting to lay my eyes on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre if I didn't already know what it looked like. 

- Paul