My Year Of Everything

You wrote about your difficulty in setting up your phone to buy movie tickets, which was still a pretty new thing in 2001. Now we can actually WATCH movies on our cell phones. Do you do this, or do you have a screen-size minimum?

When I’m on a plane, I’ll occasionally use my iPod touch to see a movie, although it’s better suited to TV series.  I watched the second and third seasons of  ”Mad Men” while commuting between Minneapolis and San Diego for Rifftrax.  I’m inclined to amplify what David Lynch said, that people are cheating themselves by watching movies on their phones.  However, this is how movies started, over a hundred years ago,  through a kinetoscope, looking at little movies made by amateurs.  Having movies in your hand that you can pull down from thin air is radical, and a whole generation will be creating stuff custom-tailored to the small format.  This is what McLuhan meant when he said “The medium is the message.” (I just happen to have Marshall McLuhan here with me.  He tells me I know nothing of his work.) 

Another major advancement since 2001 is the increasing badness of Bad Travolta. Watching “Swordfish” (more than once), could you even have imagined “Old Dogs?”

Ah, the smell of ham, the cab-forward face.  The more an actor tries to convince me with his alleged versatility, surprising role choices and perceived range, the more I realize that the best actors are unformed clay shaped by story, photography and direction.