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ThinkFrame

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Joined May 27th 2009

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3 Ways You Can Tell Whether You Might Be Annoying Others At the Movie Theatre

May 27th 2009 03:56
By now, we're all used to the pre-show, in-theare advertisements telling us "Don't spoil the movie by adding your own soundtrack." If you're like me, you also think the sound of that baby's crying voice is real! For the most part I think people respect that request. But if so, why do I always seem to end up sitting beside the guys who have to talk through the whole movie and don't care that they might be annoying others?!

So here's a few ways of annoying others I thought I'd bring to your attention in case you might be one of these guys or gals and you haven't considered the possibility.

You Might Be Annoying Others At the Theatre If:

1. You continue talking to your friend/partner after the initial advertisements are over. Yes, even talking over the previews is annoying. You may think the previews don't count, but others do. In my case, I find the previews to be one of the more exciting parts of the show! So if you absolutely have to keep chatting about the latest piece of special effects wizardry or what you heard on some movie blog about Christian Bale, please whisper.

2. You have your phone on and you're playing games or texting during the film. First - if you're doing that, why the heck are you at the show to begin with? Second - your phone is bright and the light is really distracting. Please turn it off or just leave the theatre if you're not interested in the film. You'll also save yourself some money.

3. You invade the personal space of others with your body's smell or movements or anything else that should stay inside you. Don't take up both arm rests. Don't sit there grabbing and itching your crotch throughout the film either (as the guy sitting next to me last weekend did). And if you have a cold, please don't come and spread it around by sneezing and hacking your way through the film.

Whew. Those are the most important ones. Do you have any to add? Because there are some people who could really use these tips.
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Angels & Demons

May 27th 2009 03:35
Let's think about Angels & Demons on its own for a moment. Forget about the Dan Brown books and the filmed version of the Da Vinci Code. I want to take a look at a few things I absolutely loved as well as mention a couple of points I found a bit disappointing.

First - what kind of top Harvard academic specialist of signs in the early modern period is not going to be able to read Latin? The first time Tom Hanks heads down to the Vatican archives with the leading quantum physicist, she offers to read the Galileo to him, since it's in Latin, and, well, she's Italian - probably the single closest living language related to it. Hanks agrees. This isn't a major disappointment, and I'm not a "realist" freak (as in, "that's so not realistic it ruined my experience of the film) and I'm not pointing it out to feel elitist or more discerning than you. It just struck me as an interesting choice on the part of the directorial team.

Second - I wished the "science" had been mined a bit more and brought more to the foreground on an intellectual level. It's completely amazing that the writers emphasized the parallel between particle creation and (God's job) world creation. So much so, in fact, that the characters talk about the "God particle." The physicist was right when she said that it didn't matter what they called it. What matters is what it does and what its capacities are. The film only brushes the surface of the amazingly intricate things they could have done - even if only in passing conversation - with the structure and implications of subatomic physics, especially at CERN. But I guess they were afraid of going too brainy on too many people.

These points aside, this will be one of the best Hollywood films I see this year just because of its particular combination of braininess, exoticism (face it, some location will always be exotic for everyone) and the way they managed to create a fast-paced action film out of characters running around chasing centuries-old symbols. The repetition of "fours" (four *cardinals* - get it?; four directions, four winds, four cathedrals) was a bit tiring, but I suppose it provides an easy schema.

Another excellent visual strategy was the decision to draw parallels between the subterranean nature of both the Vatican archives and the particle accelerator. You can compare the cinematography - both places are underground (in literal and metaphorical senses), and the camera movements used are the same in order to introduce both. Interestingly, both CERN and the Vatican archives are presented as extremely high tech spaces.

Finally, the "climax" involving the helicopter was one of the more creative solutions to a thriller I've seen in a long time. I feel that the film could have ended there. We didn't need the add-on "second story". What do you think?
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Is Film Dead?

May 27th 2009 03:11
With the increasing spread of digital standardization throughout all sectors of the film industry -- from production to projection -- scholars, artists and cinephiles alike have been wondering about the prognosis for the celluloid medium. Is a film still a film if its object is no longer celluloid but bits and pixels?

One solution has been to reconsider "cinema" in terms of what it does, not what material it is made from. Cinema would then refer to moving images of all types - a broad category indeed that might include anything from a looped series of images projected on a wall as part of an art installation or the downloadable video on your iphone.

Some may argue that this is merely a theoretical question of concern only to academics or artists who have built their reputation working with photographic (i.e., light-activated silver halide paper or celluloid) media. Does the average moviegoer think about whether Terminator Salvation was shot on 35mm or digital? Or whether the projection itself is digital? Probably not, and aside from a few technophiles, most will not care.

The death of film is still very real, however. Owing to the material of film itself, it needs to be carefully preserved, like any cultural artifact, if it is to last for future records. Each 35mm print wears down bit by bit each time it runs through a projector. No film screening is every exactly the same as the last one.

One thing that won't change, though, is the weekly influx of bodies into darkened theatres yearning for a bit of excitement or escape from the day-to-day. It's an experience we can't get in our living rooms, and the nature of cinema is that it speaks to our contemporary times in a way that sitting at the opera or theatre might not. Cinema itself will always be alive and well, whatever it is made of.
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