By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Tony gets a bony in Movie Club: logrolling in our Times
There will be time to read the rest of A.O. Scott’s Thursday Movie Club contribution, but it does open with a forbidding hedge of gentlemen-well-met that would not be out of place over premium beers after a Manhattan evening screening:
“I’m agog at the range and erudition of the three previous posts, which I don’t hope to match. I would happily spend the next week—the next six months—studying and annotating Jonathan’s list. Reading it reminded me of why I love your books, Jonathan—”Essential Cinema: Of the Necessity of Film Canons” is the one I’ve been reading most recently. It is possible, in the book as in that roster of 24 movies, with its witty juxtapositions and exemplary cosmopolitanism, to discover not just a universe or two of taste and sensibility but also portals that lead into politics, spirituality, and every conceivable realm of human experience. Which is what movies are uniquely and almost miraculously able to offer, but perhaps too rarely deliver.
In fact, I did scroll down a little, and I like this: “…DVD and other technologies have, potentially and in fact, liberated cinephilia from the parochial confines of New York and a scattering of college towns. We are approaching an almost Borgesian situation in which a global, virtual cinematheque will be available at the spin of an iPod wheel or the click of a mouse. The softness of the domestic box office and the looming possibility of “day and date” home video and theatrical releases have been discussed mostly in terms of potential effects on the movie industry. A corollary question that has not been raised sufficiently is what effect the eclipse of theatrical exhibition and the proliferation of available titles for home consumption will have on film culture.” [Much more from the panel at the link; the Scott pic is from the Times, the Rosenbaum from this Argentinian movie site.]