By this point, plenty of clever-boots cinemaphages have all had their poke at David Denby for his recent "well, duh" piece on the state of Hollywood filmmaking today, Big Pictures. Still, because of its up-to-the-minute overview of various technologies, I assigned it to the kiddies to augment their textbook [published in 2002] reading on distribution and exhibition.
Also, well, I wanted a whipping boy. See, Denby begins his oh-so-bold sally into the state of the viewing nation by bemoaning the picture quality of Pirates of the Caribbean as seen on an iPod. It sucks, says the American Sucker. But these kids today, with their hip-hop music etc., are what he calls platform agnostic. They don't care how they see what they see. The little vulgarians.
Much better, he tells us, is the viewing experience he had at the high-end home theatre of a well-heeled pal and on another chum's "excellent forty-two-inch gas-plasma screen." Yeah, I bet. Must be nice. But don't worry, true believers. There will always be an England theatrical distribution in some form because, as James Shamus helpfully points out, "You say, 'Do you want to go the movies with me Friday night?' Movies
are a pretext for social interaction. So don't think of the future in
terms of technology. It's not a question of platforms but of how people
want to use social spaces, how given ethnic and age groups want to
interact." And kids, students, will always want to get laid. Ah, the eternal verities.
It's about here that I explained to the students that Denby's last book detailed his online porn addiction and his disastrous investments in high tech. And suggested that his argument was not only generationally divisive --"we long to be overwhelmed by that flush of emotion when image, language, movement, and music merge" versus those poor kids, who "will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don't yet know it—even if they never know it"--it was all incredibly classist to boot.
Granted, they're not giving away iPods just yet, but it's still a platform that's a lot more accessible to average folks [and by that I mean the youth] than some plasma screen or pimped-out home theatre. And I know the well-heeled audience the New Yorker targets, but c'mon. Condescending shit like this makes the cinetrix wish Denby's traditional-aged fellow students at Columbia had gone all Zéro de Conduite on his pompous ass.
Roll credits.
