I would say that God cares about me as much as I care about this or that granule of sand as I walk on the beach in Santa Monica or Florida or Barbados. Do I care about the granule? Not particularly but I value it in a certain context. I respect the place it has in the universe. Do I hate the granule of sand? Of course not. Do I feel affection for it? No, but who would? A microscopic component in the grandest of schemes is hardly worth “caring” about. That’s pretty much how “God” feels about me, no offense.
Tuesday was one of the most glorious New York City days ever — dry, sunny, blue skies, perfect temps. LAX flight landed at JFK around 8 am, dumped bags at Lex and 51st just before 10 am, had late breakfast with friends at Grammercy Park hotel, moved my stuff over to an Airbnb rental in Fort Greene…and promptly encountered the mother of all dead-zone wifi problems. Agony. I caught a 6 pm screening of What Maisie Knew and then met Jett in F.G. Tomorrow is another day.
Temporary HE headquarters at 128 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Last Friday night N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott essentially said that high-quality, large-screen viewing experiences are always desirable, but what matters most is that viewers have a chance to see the good smaller films (like Jeff Nichols‘ Mud) even if it means seeing them under diminished or even semi-crappy conditions — on a 42-inch screen in your living room, say, or on an iPad3. And he’s right. But boy, am I glad I live in a realm that allows me a chance to see films as they’re really meant to be seen.
Seeing new films under the finest technical circumstances has always been a gimme for the industry elite and urban swells. But today the New Diminshment is small screens. iPad3, Macbook Pro and iPhone viewings drain the wonder out of films, but at least films — the smaller ones particularly — are accessible via new technologies in outlying areas. It’s not exactly a shit-and-lettuce sandwich for movie lovers who live in the sticks, but the situation flirts with that. If you’ve never left the farm, the farm is fine. But once you’ve been to Paris…
Have you noticed that almost every hotshot entertainment website these days has the same damn look? That look can be described as follows: Acres of white space with large-point-size type with huge boldfaced headlines. All the hip web designers got together on a video conference call about 18 months ago and decided on this. The apparent consensus us that GenY readers don’t want density. They want their websites to look like pre-school children’s books, like The Adventures of Babar and Celeste.
