I’ve been holding off on writing this (probably) final installment of my ‘Future of Distribution’ miniseries for almost a month, because it’s been hard to dig up the time but also, and more significantly, because it’s hard to imagine that a 1500-word article could offer much insightful on how we can start to reorient our approach to getting movies seen. Nonetheless – if we’re going to take movies seriously, we need to think about how they’re seen and how to try to ensure that the new challenges and new opportunities afforded by this new digital age can help us to make movies better, rather than more cautiously.
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Last weekend, being wholly uninspired by the selection of new movies available to me (how excited did you really expect me to get about Dark Shadows, A Tim Burton Film?), I was pleased to discover that the ArcLight Hollywood was doing a set of screenings of classic movies. I found out about it too late to go to Doctor Zhivago, which would have been my first choice, but was happy enough to make it to a 5pm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket. It was my sixth of Kubrick’s movies, but only the first that I’d seen on the big screen.
It wouldn’t be accurate or fair to say that, having seen it on the big screen, I now can’t imagine seeing it any other way; great movies are great wherever and however you see them, be it in the theater or, now, perhaps even on the screen of your iPhone, whatever David Lynch has to say about it. Nonetheless, it was a distinct pleasure and privilege to experience it that way, and it’s hard to imagine, for instance, the vividness and clarity of its final set piece, when Private Joker’s squad is trying to track down a sniper in the hell of a bombed-out Vietnamese town, coming across nearly so powerfully from my television set.
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