Skip to main content

Silence is Overrated

I think we can all agree that just about the most annoying thing one can do in a theater (next to talking non-stop) is whipping out the smartphone and begin Tweeting, playing games, or checking your email. It's bloody obnoxious and it detracts from the movie-watching experience, but don't tell that to Paramount Pictures, who are going to allow moviegoers to be inconsiderate jackasses and fiddle with their phones whilst watching Terminator: Genisys. I wish I were making this up.

“This is a true breakthrough for the movie industry. Video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and merging that with the movies in a way that’s interactive, fun and truly memorable is a very exciting proposition for an industry seeking to innovate. This breakthrough may be equally exciting for the video game industry. The movies offer the very best in screen and sound while providing audiences with a first of its kind, collective, in-person gaming experience.”

I'm sorry, but "A true breakthrough in the movie industry"?! How is Tweeting and playing games in a dark theater a fucking benchmark for movies? All it's does is it just gives my generation encouragement to be rude jerkoffs in a packed cinema. Thanks, Paramount: It's bad enough that you're hitting the reset button on two movies that didn't need to be all but discard, but this makes me want to watch your shitty Terminator-reboot flick even less now. Oh, and FYI: if you need this stupid gimmick to put butts in the seats, there's a good chance your movie might suck.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lost in Translation

I think it's fair to assume that a lot of us were very skeptical upon hearing that Masmure Shinrow's cyberpunk manga Ghost in the Shell  was being updated for mainstream audiences, in the form of a live-action film. We've seen how this business has handled manga/Anime properties in the past, and the track record, outside of the Wachowskis' Speed Racer , has been dismal, to say the least. When it was revealed that Scarlett Johansson was chosen to play Major Motoko Kusanagi, the Internet went ablaze, the cries that studio suits were whitewashing a beloved Anime character, as well as petitions making the rounds to remove the actress from the role in favor of an Asian actress to carry the role. When the first trailer dropped in mid-November of last year, I think most of us were blown away with just how, on a surface level, it looked like the live-action version might do the original source material justice. Then, the actual film was released. It's hard to talk about...

Thank you, Roger Ebert.

As a kid growing up, there were a few things I spend my time doing on Saturdays: getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons, going to the movies with my parents, playing outside with my roller-skates, and watching the latest edition of Siskel & Ebert on television. In fact, that was probably one of the moments of the day I was looking forward to. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert didn't just debate about the latest movies that had just been released; they didn't just argue back and forth about why this movie worked or why it was awful. These men didn't just love movies, they lived, breathed the power of cinema as an art form. And I don't think no one person exemplified this kind of mad-hot passion for, well....anything better than Ebert himself. Even after Gene's death in February of 1999, the man still carried on and talked about his love of the movies, with other critics and cinemaphiles, from Lisa Scwartzburn of Entertainment Weekly, to Harry Knowles ...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Great Movies: The 10 Best Films of 2014 - Part II

And here's (finally) part two of my list of the best from last year, along with the full list at the bottom. 5. The Wind Rises  - The worst thing I can honestly say about this gorgeous animated feature is that, at 126 minutes, it wasn't long enough. I could get lost in Hayao Miyazaki's final effort for hours and not get bored. The writer-director-animator is a master of whisking us away to new worlds of his own creation, but how fitting that his last masterwork is where we're rooted into the past as Miyazaki tells the story of real-life Jiro Horikoshi as he lives out his dreams of building airplanes, despite them being used for the Imperial Army back in World War II. Every last frame of this film - from Jiro's dreams with fellow designer Giovanni Caproni and his brief romance with Nahoko, to showing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932 and his journey to Nazi Germany several years later - is painstakingly beautiful and artfully crafted to within an inch of his...