Around 9 am this morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn posted an analysis piece titled “Audiences Aren’t Getting Dumber, They’re Just Overwhelmed.” No offense to Eric, but I found a comment thread riff by a guy named “Jasper” (a nom de plume inspired by Chinatown‘s “Jasper Lamar Crabb“?) to be slightly more interesting.

“We’re living in oversaturated media times and it will only get worse, because everybody will [eventually] be a filmmaker, a studio and a distributor at the same time. All technology is going into this direction. Moving images will eventually be an ‘extension of man’ that Marshall McLuhan didn’t dare to dream of.

“Entertainment will always matter because life is actually pretty boring: Children are boring, jobs are boring, everything will bore you after a while…even sex. But cinema never gets boring, because it constantly re-invents itself and is open for new content.

“Moving Images are also a technique of creating ‘proof’ and to communicate your experience. For example take a look at “Camino-One feature length selfie” (2019).

“To see films on smartphones is okay if the films were made for smartphones to begin with. There are other films, of course, that were not intended to be seen this way. Perhaps they could carry a warning’ at the beginning or a ‘plan’ how to watch and show them?

“First Reformed should definitely be seen in a dark, big cinema full of people, otherwise it probably doesn’t work as intended.”

HE to Jasper Lamar Crabb: Good movies are about real life with the boring parts removed. Your job may be boring (sorry if that’s the case) but writing never is. Plus I’ve never found young kids to be boring. You know what’s vaguely boring? That short hiking film that you linked to.