Movie of the Week
Movies have been a big part of my life for over fifty years. They were my screen time in high school. They were big event gatherings in college. They were weekend entertainment getaways in my early adulthood. They were a videotaped passion to share with my kids on vacation at the beach house or the ski house. And now, in later adulthood, they are major relaxation fillers for an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, and something to share with like-minded friends and family. I often wonder what compels some people to love movies and others to avoid them as much as they can. It is like when I hear people talk of the difference between fiction and non-fiction writing. There are those who like the escapism and fantasy of fiction, and there are those who have little use for it and prefer the learning experience of non-fiction. I think you can learn a lot about a person just by plumbing the depths of that preference. With movies it is a bit more nuanced because unless the movie is a documentary (and sometimes even with those), a movie is a story, whether based on a real life story or totally fictionalized. The key with movies is that there is a narrative arc that has a movie move through the stages of its cycle form start to finish. A movie is a journey and to get the full effect of a movie, you need to focus your attention on it for the several hours it runs. To do less is to risk dismissiveness out of hand. When you only casually watch a movie, perhaps multitasking or glancing at other nearby goings-on, you don’t immerse yourself in the story and do not tend to feel its total impact.
I believe this issue of focus is one of the reasons people talk of wanting to see something on the big screen. To a certain extent, having a movie fill up all of your visual landscape is immersive all by itself. Surrounding it with black soundproofing and the silence of a darkened theater goes even further in that regard. Today’s home theaters can recreate that effect to a large extent. Even if you just have a big screen (83-85 inches are now price-pointed to be affordable by most), you get a lot of the “field of vision” filling experience. I am unclear about whether seeing a movie alone or with others helps or hurts the issue of focus. If one is surrounded by others equally focused on the screen, it can be a supportive chorus. If those in the theater are busy asking questions and whispering or throwing popcorn, the distraction is hard to ignore.
But regardless of the surroundings and viewing circumstances, I still believe people are either movie people or not and they probably exist on a spectrum in that regard. I will start by declaring that I sit at the extreme end of the spectrum and almost always default to watching a movie versus watching anything else. When our friends Steve & Maggie were here no long ago, they let it be known that they liked watching documentaries and science fact shows. I watched a few and even signed up for a subscription to the channel that specializes in them, but as much as I enjoyed them, they haven’t displaced my love of engaging in the stories in the movies. This weekend, when we were visited by Gary & Oswaldo, we have a tradition of picking a movie almost every night to watch all together. These days it is hard enough to find a movie to watch when I am by myself. Between Prime, Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Max and Cinemax, you would think that there would be a wide enough selection to satisfy any movie-going desire, but not so. First of all you have to get past the personalization that these cable services set to serve up offerings they think I will like. Personalization algorithms are interesting if you want to stay on a specific viewership path, but I find myself wanting a far greater selection that they are inclined to give me. Add to that conundrum three more people in the mix of selecting a movie and you have a recipe for stasis.
You see, both Kim and Gary are quite particular about what movies they want to watch. I’m sort of used to working through Kim’s no-fly list, which can be extensive, but has a pattern that I can anticipate. Kim does not appreciate violence, warfare or anything from the era of WWII (one of my go-to topics). I can easily eliminate about 90+% of the movies that Kim will nix. The other 10% are a bit random or on the light side of the violence spectrum. And Oswaldo, in his inimitable fashion, is always up for anything. But Gary is very particular about his movies and likes to survey the entire array of possibilities. The problem is that Gary’s repertoire of movies that he has seen falls well short of abundant. I sense that he is not like me and does not enjoy seeing movies more than once. That means that he wants a fresh movie that appeals to his interests, which are not really obvious or even elaborated, and thus presumably known only to him. That means that we are left to the mercy of the two or three sentences that are posted to explain the movie to potential watchers. It seems that they aren’t up to the standards that Gary believes are necessary for them to be useful to him in his selection process. In fact, more often than not, Gary feels its necessary to rail against the faceless authors of those little squibs.
After about two or three dozen rejected movie titles, I usually start doing two things. I start moving through the movie selections more quickly and I start sighing a lot. Neither of those two reactions are helpful and while I can actually flip through movies very quickly since I know most of them by name, I recognize that not everyone else, especially Gary and Kim, have the viewership depth or movie recall capability that I have. What usually happens at that point is that I stop and land on a title that I think Kim will like. She has a soft spot for detective thrillers that seems incongruous with her dislike for violence and thus, can usually raise some interest from her. If I can interest her, I have a much better chance of luring Gary into a yes. In fact, that’s exactly the process we went through last night, but the movie we ended up watching ended up leaving a lot to be desired.
The other approach that has worked in the past is to have a particular title in mind long before we sit down in front of the TV. If I can land on an interesting movie title and can spin an interesting story to sell to Gary during the day, I stand a decent chance of getting buy-in. Kim will usually go along with a pre-baked movie plan so long as it isn’t clearly a gore-filled flick. The secret is to keep us out of the real time movie research program, which rarely ends well.
I will always be a movie person. I will choose movies over almost any other form of entertainment. I like an occasional series, especially these days with all the star power and production value that is being put into them. But the narrative arc of a two-hour movie is what I am used to and what I have grown to enjoy the most. My buddy Mike is still a Netflix DVD mailer customer, one of the last of his breed, especially since Netflix has announced its discontinuation of that service in favor of streaming. Mike knows how to stream, he just thinks the quality and selection are better on a hardcopy dvd/Blue Ray disc. That method has worked fine for Mike because he is still a once a week movie watcher. It’s a light day for me to watch only one movie, so the movie of the week program is hard for me to fathom. But then again, Mike probably doesn’t have the nightly angst I have in selecting a movie that satisfies my wife and his guests.