Nevermind the question – here’s the answer.
There is something of which we are all technologically guilty. It’s not porn. Well, it might be, depending on your proclivities and your honesty. No, it’s more admissible than that.
Allow me to set a scene. A few people huddle around a laptop as the white light blears up into their pale faces. They are virtually unblinking as the FOX Searchlight logo rolls into the title sequence of Juno. Fine? Well. Juno was only released a day ago at the cinema.
Yet! Despite the persistent rise of cleverly evolving download platforms, still the bigwigs have crawled out and magnanimously announced 2007 as a year of the highest recorded box-office figures.
In my experience there are three clear “download” camps. There are those that sit around proclaiming hawkishly about the quantity and quality of cinema on their computer, sniggering loudly at those who fork out over £10 to go and see There Will Be Blood. There are those who think BitTorrent is a volatile weather pattern. And then there are those who are probably just as smug as the first: the cinephile. This camp is possibly the worst, because as much as they’ll lean around espousing the virtues of the cinematic experience (”you can’t beat the SOUND, you know, and it just reminds me of when I was an innocent kid…”) they’re just as likely to form a percentage of that pale-faced troupe crowding around a 14-inch Mac screen, thereby corroding any ideological superiority they may have otherwise assumed.
Though, perhaps they have a point. David Lynch recently ranted about the “tragedy” of watching “a film on your f*****g telephone.” And IMAX convinced me that cinema might have finally evolved away from the nickelodeon experience it once was and become a truly bodily experience.
There’s nothing new to the epic film, and it’s no news that technological progression has left legislation in the dust and studios gulping for air. Now though, it seems the studios are blearily discovering bigger really is the answer. And, observing the wake of 2007’s cinema that led to such monumental takings: Spiderman 3, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, Pirates Of The Carribean: At World’s End, Transformers… it would appear that maybe, just maybe, they could be right.
