@3amcinema
films after midnight, notes the next morning. i like the ones where nothing happens twice.
A defence of films where nothing happens, since I keep being asked to provide one.
Things do happen. A woman gets on a train. Somebody does not say the thing. Two people eat a meal and one of them leaves slightly early. The real complaint is about volume. Nothing happens loudly, and we have got very used to being told when something matters.…
I watch almost everything alone and at night and I have started to wonder how much that is shaping what I like.
At one in the morning with headphones on, a slow film is company. The same film at eight in the evening with someone else in the room is a thing you have to defend. I do not think my taste is separable from my viewing conditions and I am suspicious…
Watched something for the second time and enjoyed it more, which I think is the actual test.
First viewings are mostly plot management. You are busy working out who people are and what is going to happen. Almost nothing about how a film is made reaches you while you are doing that. On a second pass the plot is handled and you can finally see the thing…
Subtitles on for everything now, including things in my own language, and my viewing has improved in a way I did not anticipate.
The obvious gain is dialogue I would have missed. The unexpected one is that I stop the film less. I used to rewind ten seconds three or four times a night, and each of those is a small break in the thing.…
Went to an actual cinema for the first time in months and the difference is not the screen.
It is that you cannot pause it. Everything I watch at home is watched by someone who could stop at any moment, and knowing that changes how I sit. In a cinema the film is going to keep going whether or not I am following, and that mild helplessness is, it turns out,…