The Projector #64: Lost in the Stream (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

I usually end this newsletter with some links to pieces we like — and will this week as well — but sometimes it feels worthwhile to focus on one especially relevant item, like our friend Sam Adams’ recent Slate column “We Have Glimpsed Our Streaming Future, and It Sucks.” It’s less about the downsides of watching movies at home than the downsides of only being able to watch movies at home. And it’s less about the pleasures of going to the movies than the problems that arise when there are no movies to go to.

Sam sees it as a twofold problem. First, the mere fact of a theatrical release helps winnow notable movies from those that, well, aren’t:

On a purely practical level, theaters act as a filter, a way of separating out a small handful of the hundreds of movies released every year, and although the system by which they end up there is riven with biases and blind spots, on balance, the movies that end up there are better than the ones that don’t, and their limited runs create a sense of occasion and urgency that the boundless availability of streaming can’t match. (There are movies in my Netflix list I’ve been meaning to get around to since 2009.)

It often feels impossible to keep up with everything that’s coming out and sort signal from noise. And though Sam doesn’t say it, the de-emphasis on reviews doesn’t help. At The Dissolve we tried to review almost everything that played theaters even as the number of films getting a theatrical release, however small, ramped up. But reviews have gotten rarer, as have sites like RogerEbert.com that try to be comprehensive. The big streaming debuts, say Pixar's Soul, will be events anyway. But the less blockbuster-y releases can feel like an undifferentiated mass of movies when they're just another option on the VOD service. (And don't get us started on how exclusivity means looking for a particular movie feel like a safari. Is the new Sofia Coppola on Hulu? Apple TV+? Who can remember?)

The second problem is related. While many fine movies have debuted on streaming in 2020, some require the kind of effort that when you’re at home, at the end of a day of dread and doomscrolling, can be hard to muster. Am I going to watch Never Rarely Sometimes Always? Absolutely. But it’s easy to punt that down the road for another night of Bob’s Burgers when you’re not making the committed choice to go to the theater to see it.

Will movie theaters returning solve this? Maybe. Maybe not. And even when theaters do widely reopen and everyone feels safe going to them, it’ll be a while before we sort out what moviegoing will look like in the '20s. But hopefully it won’t be like it is now.

All that being said, we’re still focused on quarantainment and we’ve kicked off a two-fer of dysfunctional families of the recent past with The Ice Storm. 

And, when you’re done with Sam’s piece, here are a few others.

• For Vulture, Hunter Harris writes about “the year’s best movie scene,” a moment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe entry Lovers Rock. (This may sound like exaggeration but, take it from one who’s seen it, it’s not.) Also, here’s a Keith Phipps review of Small Axe.

• For the New York Times, Patton Oswalt reviewed Melissa Maerz’s Dazed and Confused oral history Alright, Alright, Alright.

• Also for Vulture, Sarah Jones ponders who the audience for Hillbilly Elegy is supposed to be.

• Those tired girly-girl cliches you see in a lot of animation? You won’t find it on Adventure Time, Petrana Radulovic argues in Polygon.

• How does Heaven’s Gate look at 40, removed from the aura of failure? Pretty good, Scott Tobias claims in The Guardian.