Drinking the sand

When I was in sixth grade, I plagiarized the hell out of The American President, an underrated film, when creating a fake political campaign for the election of Plato into the US Congress (don't ask). So while I picked wonderful lines from the movie to add to my campaign speech, there's one sequence I couldn't quite shoehorn into it. It goes as follows:

Lewis Rothschild: You have a deeper love of this country than any man I've ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism. 
President Andrew Shepherd: Look, if the people want to listen to-... 
Lewis Rothschild: They don't have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand. 
President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.

James Cameron had a quote recently about people who watch his movies, specifically Avatar, on small screens like the iPhone: "I think it's dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they're not visible." He's right. It's dumb.

But sometimes, that's all you got. I have Lawrence of Arabia on DVD and I've watched it probably a dozen times on television or my notebook computer. However,  in a snobbish way, I've really only seen the movie once. If you recall, I was lucky enough to catch a 70mm print in Silver Spring, MD at the AFI theater. Watching the scenes were Lawrence appears as a speck on the horizon and rides toward the camera are more powerful and evocative when viewed in a theater with a large screen. I've had so many people comment that The Apartment is a great widescreen movie, but I've probably seen it more times on television as a pan and scan distortion than as a widescreen movie, let alone in a theater on a large screen that adds to its widescreen effect. As a result, a lot of the enjoyment that film scholars get from that movie are lost on me. Does that mean the movie doesn't work for me? Well, it's my favorite Billy Wilder movie.

Right now as I write this, on a 24in screen two feet from my face is a heavily compressed (mp4 artifacts and such) of Peeping Tom, the haunting film by Michael Powell. Are the artifacts distracting in some of the dimly light scenes? Sure. Does some of the irony of the camera work with the movie theater setups not work quite as well since I'm not watching this in a movie theater myself? Absolutely. However, this is the only way I'll probably ever get to watch the movie.

Ultimately, we have to make do with our circumstances. I don't go to the movies that often because I don't like going to them alone. I wasn't alive to see some of the great Technicolor and widescreen movies. So, I watch them at home, in 700mb files, on computer monitors with a less than devoted attention. For some, they don't notice these issues or consider them hinderances on the movies themselves. For example, a former girlfriend gave me for my birthday a pan and scan version of a movie. She had no idea what "pan and scan" is, probably wouldn't notice too much of a difference in picture quality from DVD to blu-ray, or realize that her television is distorted because she's stretching 4:3 images into a 16:9 screen. Sometimes, we drink the sand because we don't know the difference. Sometimes, it's all we got.

The audience makes the movie

I was once asked what films I would have loved to have seen in a theater on a big screen. I thought about the question and answered it in two ways. The first answer is more conventional, in that there are some movies I wish I could have seen on a big screen with rich sound. The second part to my answer was a series of films I would have liked to have seen with a large audience to experience their reaction.

The Crying Game immediately came to mind. Here's a movie that starts and sets itself as a political-esque thriller where a young man, Forest Whitaker, gets kidnapped at a carnival by the Irish Republican Army. The audience assumes that this will be the movie, but as the first hour of the film concludes, the hero is switched and the film becomes somewhat of a love story. The "big" reveal in the film is something I would have loved to experience with random strangers.

Every Quentin Tarantino film I've seen in a theater has had walkouts. The most occurred in the first thirty minutes of Kill Bill, particularly after the hospital scenes. Akin to the violence in that, I would have loved to have seen A Clockwork Orange just to count the number of walkouts after the musical number.

The Last Emporer was a culture shock to me when I first saw it, as  I had virtually no knowledge of Eastern society. I still think the scenes with the wet nurse are odd and would loved to have seen if others felt the same about them.

This year in various film festivals, the film Antichrist met with great revolt. After seeing the film myself, I can pinpoint various scenes that would have bothered viewers enough to walk out. Still, what's still shocking is that it is the violence and sexual content that usually drives people to leave a theater, and not the intellectual assault of a movie like this. I'm not referring to a difference of opinions, such as someone might have for walking out of Fahrenheit 9/11 or Dirty Harry, but to be bombarded with thought that it becomes overwhelming is a rarity. Antichrist is a strange and compelling film.