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The Projector #93: Quarantainment 2.0? (Patreon)

Published:
2021-08-03 01:01:34
Imported:
2021-08

Content

by Keith Phipps

This installment’s mostly about a question we’re going to have to talk over at Next Picture Show HQ, but I wanted to get your thoughts as part of that discussion: Do we need to go back to focusing on films you can watch at home? We made one in-theaters-only release, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, half of our last pairing, and our next pairing will include The Green Knight. (Never let it be said that we passed up a chance to cover a David Lowery movie.) But another piece of writing about The Green Knight got me wondering if we made the jump too soon. Or maybe we made the jump at an appropriate time but now need to jump back.

Over at his (very good) Substack, critic Ty Burr calls The Green Knight “the best movie I don’t want you to see.” He continues:

The Green Knight should absolutely be seen in a movie theater. You should absolutely not go see The Green Knight in a movie theater.

Both of these statements are true, which makes David Lowery’s new movie the Schrödinger’s cat of this week’s openings. As the Delta variant spreads and we all take one step back toward the practical cautions of recent months, gathering with a crowd to look at images on a wall once more seems bold at best, foolhardy at worst.

All this being said, I am going to go see The Green Knight in the theater tonight. My plan is to remain masked the entire time, stay as far away from other humans as possible, and choose a screening I suspect will be lightly attended. It’s a matter of, I feel, minimizing the risk to myself and my family. That I’m vaccinated is the biggest step, but I plan to act as if I’m not to be safe.

Is it enough? I think so? But this is a considerably different strategy to the one I used just a couple of weeks ago when I went to see The Forever Purge. (It’s fine. Great concept, good-enough execution… a Purge movie, in other words). I put a mask in my pocket before walking into the multiplex and, after looking around the lobby and seeing no one else was masked, it remained there the whole time. It didn’t feel dangerous. In fact, it felt like a relief. It felt like we were back were we were before and that felt good.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m going tonight but I’m going to treat it like my last trip to the movies for a while. Whether or not it will be… I hope not? The Delta variant developments are scary, there’s no getting around that. And the landscape keeps changing the longer, well, you probably don’t need a lecture about the unvaccinated from me.

That’s where I am. Where are you? And would you rather we return to at-home selections? Let us know.

All that being said, we hope you enjoy our Crumb / Roadrunner pairing. Crumb definitely can be watched at home, and chances are you’ll come away from it without a lot of thoughts. We certainly did. (And thanks to Noel Murray for joining us! We hope to have him back again soon.)

Suggestions for stuff to read: You want ’em, we got ’em (or at least we have a couple this week).

• For ScreenCrush, Matt Singer compares two remarkable long takes in films released in 1990: one that helped make a movie a classic, the other part of an infamous flop.

• At Vulture, Rob Turbovsky offers an oral history of Clifford, the Martin Short/Charles Gordin- starring flop that became a cult classic.

Files

Comments

Patrick Crumlish

Hard one to call. I was in a cinema for the first time in 17 months last week, in a socially distanced theatre with very few pateons wearing a mask, and all felt OK. My wife and I are both double vaccinated and were happy to being the kids. But hospital numbers starting to creep back up here in Ireland, and I'm not sure when I will go again. I don't even have the option of seeing The Green Knight in the cinema, as it has been pulled from UK and Ireland distribution, for COVID reasons. Had been greatly looking forward to it.

Mike Weston

I've been fully vaccinated since late April, but I don't see enough movies to even consider going into a theater when there are so many things I'm behind on at home. Maybe once Oscar season is in full swing, around December.

Michelle M

It’s a delight to hear Noel on the podcast!

jamsheed siyar

To put it bluntly, I’m going to movie theaters and I’m going to continue going. I’m fully vaccinated, I live in a place (manhattan) with high vaccination rates, I don’t have kids and am very rarely around kids (or knowingly around immunocompromised people), and I missed going to the movies about as much as anything else last year. I’ll probably start wearing a mask again, and other than that I feel totally comfortable about this choice. I can probably say quite a bit more about this, but ultimately being able to do things like going to the movies is for me a large part of the point of being vaccinated. So as far as I am concerned, I welcome episodes on movies only in theatrical release, but I totally understand I’m probably in the minority here.

nattyn8

I’m vaccinated so I’m largely safe from the worst of it, but I can easily be a carrier, and local hospitals are getting as full as during the peak last year. I realize that if enough people were vaccinated and masked we could actually beat this thing but the reality is that’s not what we have chosen to do in the USA. So I will continue to watch from home. I’ll gladly pay for premium rentals. I’ll patiently wait a few weeks or a couple months for the latest releases. And be glad if the one family member we lost ends up being the only one. I love movies. I’d say they have saved me over the years in more ways than I can count. But given the choice of helping slow the spread versus having to wait a few weeks to see things, I’m okay with the delay. But you guys do you. Review what you want, when you want.

Josh Hammond

This couldn't have been more timely as I was planning to go see The Greek Knight this week. I desperately want to see a movie on the big screen, but I feel like the risk calculus has changed from last week. Not sure what I'm going to do.

The Next Picture Show

About that outing (Keith here): I went to a theater with assigned seating and chose a seat all the way in the back and to one side thinking no one else would buy tickets near me. But it's a small theater and some unmasked yahoo ended up sitting next to me. I went to Fandango to see what seats had not been sold then moved to one of those. It was not the most relaxing trip to the movies.

Ross C

It's a little frustrating as theater-only showings are returning after a lot of us were becoming accustomed to simultaneous streaming releases. I'm fully vacced, but my father is in a seniors facility, and I'm terrified of bringing something in there after they haven't allowed family visits in a year. I think studios removing the choice to stream is premature.

Mark

"Or maybe we made the jump at an appropriate time but now need to jump back." I suspect it might be that. But I'm someone, who despite living in a major US city, seemed to get the major art-house releases a month or two later than most cities. With the exception of the highly anticipated movies, I usually found myself even in pre-pandemic times streaming a lot of movies at the end of the year/start of the subsequent year, so I'm fairly passive on this decision. I have heard talk in some coverage, that Delta is so contagious that it burns through populations fairly quickly, so there is also a chance we're about to get a large spike and then in a couple of months, it's less scary again? Or maybe not and it'll continue to be horrible.

Mark

Wrt masks, I think the most recent NPR's Science Friday mentioned that we aren't exactly facing a shortage of PPE like we were at the beginning of the pandemic, and as such people might want to consider getting n95 or kn95 masks now. (I admittedly do wonder if *everyone* did do that, if we would then have a shortage). But that might be something to consider for those braving the theaters.

Green-billed Magpie

I did go out to see Roadrunner to support our local theater. There were literally less than 10 people there besides us, and it didn't feel too scary. But since then things have gotten worse around here, and restrictions are back in effect. This subscriber would probably welcome continuing quarantainment from the podcast for now.