Canny Management

The Miracle of Personality

2012-01-29T01:25:00.001-06:00

Tropic of Cancer, pp. 248-249:

If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

Modern progress

2011-10-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

Tropic of Cancer, p. 162:

I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.

Young Adult at Music Box Theatre

2011-10-23T14:19:00.013-05:00

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody continue to tour Young Adult. After screenings in New York, Toronto, and Minneapolis, Young Adult came to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago.

My co-editor, RD, recorded the complete audio of the Q&A; I've divided it into three parts. The embedded audio file appears first, followed by the questions within that file.

I bolded the parts that, to me, were the highlights of the evening and listed timecodes for them so that you can scrub through. I added only a few comments and transcribed one answer.

Obviously, following an advance screening, the Q&A is filled with spoilers. I suggest stopping here until you've seen the film. Young Adult opens wide on December 16.

Note: I am not the really audible laughing guy.

Part 1 of 3 (17:07)

Q. To JR. What attracted you to the script?

Q. To DC. Explain how you saw Mavis’s trajectory as a character.

DC: I have this theory that assholes don't actually change.

Q: To DC. Were you inspired by going to your own high school reunion?

Q: Was one of the action figures in the sex scene Night Owl from Watchmen?

05:31 - 06:45
Q: [Steve Prokopy had joked at the beginning of the screening that the audience was going to watch Happy Feet 2.] Was that anything like the original? The first Happy Feet?

JR and PO riff on the confusion.

Q: What made you decide to pick Music Box for a theater?

Q: When you were thinking about the character of Mavis, did you had a vision of the character? Did you picture Charlize Theron?

Q: Patton, how did you get involved with this?

Q: To DC. Eavesdropping on teenagers. How much of that was intentional? Are you trying to comment on Juno, etc.?

Q: To DC. Did you know what was going to happen to Mavis at the beginning, or did she lead you there?

Q: To DC. Was the theme of young adult fiction a constant from the beginning?

Part 2 of 3 (15:12)

00:00 - 02:55
Q: How did you guys do the leg? Did you blow your entire CGI/prosthetics budget?

The answer includes PO's acting preparation with a physical therapist and his Daniel Day-Lewis-like dedication to the craft, as well as the logistics of a sex scene.

Q: I'm from Minnesota, and I've never heard of Mercury.

Q: 1) Business card from Village of the Giants guy 2) Mavis's name 3) How do you market a movie like this?

Q: To DC. Motif of fingernails

Q: To DC. Do you have an idea of what happens to Mavis after what we just saw?

Q: To DC. Is this a revision of Jennifer's Body? Why do you center on teenagers so much?

Q: Why did you choose Minnesota? Painted in dark, depressing, strangely accurate light.

12:06 - 15:12
Q: How different were the characters on the page as first conceived versus on the screen in the final product?

PO talks about the recent "cult of improvisation" and the merits of following a good script.

Part 3 of 3 (15:30)

Q: Patton Oswalt moving to serious films

JR's Q to PO: Shooting a certain scene from Big Fan script

Q: J.K. Simmons as "narrator"?

Q: How long did it take to film? Why didn't you do the normal route of festivals?

04:40 - 08:50
Q: Is the intercourse an act of compassion, condescension, vulnerability?

08:50 - 11:00
Q: Advice for young filmmakers. (A common question that gets a great answer from JR.)

JR: First thing, be born the son of a famous director. It's invaluable. You have no idea. [?] left and right. People just get out of your way.

Honestly, look, I think you are a young filmmaker at a very exciting time to be a young filmmaker. And, you know, back in the 70s, Coppola said the next Mozart would be some girl with a video camera from the middle of nowhere. I think he was right. He was just early because you didn't only need a video camera; you needed to be able to cut at home, and you needed a distribution system, which came through YouTube.

And the sophistication of filmmakers your age blows me away. The shit that I see online now is way better than the stuff that I was doing basically throughout my twenties as a short filmmaker and all of my contemporaries.

So, look, I think there is two great avenues for you right now that are specific to directors, which is basically YouTube and film festivals. And film festivals are where I made a name for myself. And I joke about being the son of a famous director because the truth is, when you're the son of a famous director, people presume you're gonna be an idiot. I mean, they presume you're gonna have--that you're talentless and that you have an alcohol and drug problem. Like, that's basically that going in.

PO: The first thing is untrue. He has so much talent. It's ridiculous. Before noon. Amazing. Amazing. Wow.

JR: But I used the film festival system to get legitimacy so people would actually think I was a real director. And it was playing film festivals where I felt like a real director for the first time.

So my advice is: go to tons of film festivals. You should be shooting and cutting on a daily basis 'cause it's all available to you now, and use the Internet simultaneously.

Q: What do you think is Mavis's bag of neuroses? Alcoholism, depression, narcissistic personality?

Q: Were the characters based on anyone?

Q: To DC. Getting the story out. What were you drawn to?

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CIFF reels

2011-10-23T10:41:00.010-05:00

With Anthony Mackie last weekend, we've done four major editing projects for CIFF so far. Click through to view on YouTube. They are:

Anthony Mackie, 15 October 2011

Martin Sheen, 19 August 2011

Guillermo del Toro, 15 October 2010
[Embedding is disabled because of a long Pan's Labyrinth clip before the montage. Please view on YouTube.]

Ron Howard, 12 June 2010

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Saved section of Netflix's instant queue disappears

2011-09-17T12:32:00.003-05:00

Hacking Netflix: Netflix Removes "Saved" Titles from Instant Queue

Yahoo! Answers: What happened to the Saved section in the netflix instant queue?

Streaming Criterions

2011-06-26T05:42:00.000-05:00

When coding meets movies:

A programmer used Netflix APIs and the Criterion website to create Streaming Criterions. His website neatly displays and links to all the Criterion films that are available for Watch Instantly. The content refreshes nightly.

First of all, whoa.

Second, what a great service if you're looking for stuff to stream.

Third, if things go according to plan, Netflix will lose streaming rights for all Criterion films to Hulu Plus this year. I'm still really disappointed about this deal and hope a compromise can be negotiated.

Danny Boyle at CIFF

2010-10-14T08:24:00.000-05:00

Danny Boyle graciously stayed for every single picture and autograph after the CIFF screening of 127 Hours. A guy even asked him to record a promo spot for his blog.

Best and Worst of 2010, so far

2010-07-08T15:33:00.004-05:00

[Update 23 October 2011: Since I don't maintain this blog often, I never did a final top ten of 2010. I would put Certified Copy at #1.]

Around this time last year, I had seen only three of the movies that eventually made my top ten list: The Hurt Locker (#3), Departures (#8) and Adventureland (#10). This makes sense, though, since the "prestige" movies are usually released in the fall and winter.

This year is no different, as I have few movies at this point to champion. The only true standout is Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right. What amazing performances from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. It's the best I've ever seen Bening: fierce and vulnerable, funny and heartbreaking. And what more can I say about Julianne Moore? So many solid performances throughout her career: in Boogie Nights (one of the greatest films of the last two decades), Far from Heaven; even with small roles as in A Single Man. She adds another to that list. It's a crime that she has not won an Oscar yet.

My four honorable mentions are films that did strike me in some way. Some people may dismiss City Island as a typical, contrived dysfunctional-family comedy, but I was surprised and pleased by its nimble pacing, by Julianna Margulies's able performance, and by Andy Garcia at his most enjoyable.

I didn't love I Am Love, but I was seduced by its handful of baroque sequences combining visual sumptuousness with aural assault. I can see how the ending may grate on some people, but it was refreshing to see a film go out with that kind of boldness.

Kick-Ass isn't an action-comedy masterpiece (like, say, Hot Fuzz), but I did enjoy it.

I love the ending of Bong Joon-ho's Mother.

As for the worst stuff I've seen, three of them are comic book adaptations (Can we stop with the comic book adaptations? No, I'm not talking about Batman 3, of course): Jonah Hex, The Losers, and Iron Man 2. After.Life rounds out the list.

And, not intending to be contrarian, I do think Toy Story 3, Greenberg, and Cyrus are overrated. Toy Story 3 is far down the list of best Pixar films. I will watch The Squid and the Whale one hundred times before seeing Greenberg again; I thought the former was much more honest and real and illuminating. Cyrus is plagued with faux-indie clichés: handheld camera and ridiculous zooms for the sake of—what, exactly? (see Glenn Kenny's discussion)—and contrived awkwardness ("Cyrus is watching his mom make out with someone! It's so awkward!").

Let me know if you vehemently disagree.

Best of 2010, so far
1. The Kids Are All Right

Honorable mentions, alphabetically:
City Island (2009), I Am Love (2009), Kick-Ass, Mother (2009)

Best Performances: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right); Andy Garcia (City Island)
Screenplay: The Kids Are All Right
Director: none so far ...

Overrated
1. Toy Story 3
2. Greenberg
3. Cyrus

Worst of 2010, so far
1. Jonah Hex
2. After.Life (2009)
3. The Losers
4. Iron Man 2

Also check out the list of my fellow Chicagoan, Danny King, whose post reminded me to do this: http://thekingbulletin.blogspot.com/2010/07/halftime-report-2010.html

I came across a fallen tree

2010-06-19T14:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's thunderstorms in Chicago did this to a tree in Lincoln Park:

Inception displays

2010-06-18T10:19:00.000-05:00

The big Inception displays at River East:

Summer Gala honoring Ron Howard

2010-06-13T17:29:00.005-05:00

The Chicago International Film Festival gave a Career Achievement Award to Ron Howard at their annual Summer Gala. Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Jennifer Connelly, and Winona Ryder—all cast members of Howard's film currently shooting in Chicago—were in attendance, as was Connelly's husband, Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code). The event was held at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Here is a photo of Howard holding the box that contains his Silver Hugo award and wearing the baseball cap that CIFF provided for the evening.

During the tribute, there were surprise video messages from Henry Winkler (Happy Days, Night Shift), George Lucas (American Graffiti, Willow), Roger Ebert, and Michael Keaton (Night Shift, Gung Ho, The Paper). Brian Dennehy (Cocoon) sent in a letter that was read by host Bill Kurtis.

The evening also included three guest speakers outside of the film industry: Steve Chikerotis, Deputy Chief of the Chicago Fire Department, who spoke about Backdraft; Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission; and Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who spoke about A Beautiful Mind.

Media coverage
Chicago Sun-Times: Director Howard lauded here for lustrous career
NBC Chicago: Ron Howard Filming in Chicago Again; PHOTOS: Ron Howard Honored in Chicago
Chicago Tribune: (photos) Chicago Film Festival honors Ron Howard
WLS via ABC7: Director Ron Howard honored at film festival
Entertainment Tonight: Ron Howard feted by famous friends in Chicago
Time Out Chicago: Ron Howard honored by Chicago International Film Festival

Cheaters at the Wieners Circle

2010-05-27T02:17:00.005-05:00

[Update 16 July 2010: The film has been officially titled What You Don't Know. The title of the post has been kept to match the original permalink.]
[Update 29 July 2010: The film has been renamed The Dilemma.]

~~Cheaters~~ ~~What You Don't Know~~ The Dilemma, Ron Howard's latest feature, was filming at the Wieners Circle on Clark last night. Click to enlarge.

Same pic with Howard, Vince Vaughn, and Kevin James isolated:

Another view of James and Vaughn:

Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder were also on set last night.

John C. Reilly at Cyrus screening

2010-05-19T11:44:00.002-05:00

John C. Reilly at a Q&A for Cyrus yesterday at River East. The interviewer is Steve Prokopy of Ain't It Cool News. Click to enlarge. Sorry for the poor lighting.

Link to Go, See, Talk

2010-05-17T08:53:00.000-05:00

On the IMDb Hit List today, from the blog Go, See, Talk: New vs. Used – How Do You Buy Your Movies?

Batman 3 Release Date

2010-04-30T22:04:00.001-05:00

You must have heard it by now, but Batman 3 will be released on 20 July 2012!

Here is a video that @chifilmfest linked to recently. It is of the Chicago International Film Festival's 2008 Summer Gala, at which The Dark Knight had its Chicago premiere and Christopher Nolan was honored with a special award.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj4w6PWVIWw

Never Let Me Go

2010-04-17T17:32:00.000-05:00

Finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Mark Romanek's film adaptation will be released this year.

Kick-Ass in Chicago

2010-04-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

Got to see the advance screening of Kick-Ass yesterday at River East. Actors Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz did a Q&A. Here's the horrible iPhone photo.

Scorsese in 3-D

2010-04-14T11:19:00.000-05:00

On March 24, Roger Ebert tweeted, "If Scorsese ever makes a movie in 3-D, that's when we'll know movies as we have known them are dead."

Today, HitFix reports: "Scorsese attempting 3-D with 'Hugo Cabret'"

Inception in L.A. Times

2010-04-12T00:54:00.002-05:00

Great reporting from Geoff Boucher: Christopher Nolan's 'Inception' -- Hollywood's first existential heist film

One of his earlier posts on Inception: Bigger than Batman: Christopher Nolan says 'Inception' is 'the biggest challenge I've taken on'

Finally, a great interview on Collider.com, from a few weeks ago: Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas Interview INCEPTION - They Talk 3D, What Kind of Cameras They Used, Pre-Viz, WB, and a Lot More!

I very much appreciate Nolan's preference for in-camera special effects.

Sensory processing sensitivity

2010-04-07T10:14:00.002-05:00

Thank you, Yahoo! News. I found an article in the "Most Popular" section called "Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy." That title doesn't really do justice to the content. The article is a press write-up of a new research paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: "The trait of sensory processing sensitivity and neural responses to changes in visual scenes."

The Yahoo! article summarizes the trait this way:

Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

If this sounds anything like you, I suggest reading more about sensory processing sensitivity. It might lead to some new self-knowledge.

Giada vs. Raquel Welch

2010-04-06T23:02:00.000-05:00

I saw the new books by Giada De Laurentiis (of Everyday Italian on the Food Network) and Raquel Welch inside Borders tonight. Giada's is titled Giada at Home; Raquel's, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage. But I wonder whether we'd have more appropriate titles if Raquel gave her catchy subtitle to Giada.

Giada: Beyond the Cleavage.

If you watch her, you know it's apropos.

After.Life

2010-04-06T22:47:00.001-05:00

Saw a terrible movie with Liam Neeson and Christina Ricci called After.Life (2009). I am all for genre pictures, bizarre concepts, etc., but you have to do it well. Don't get me started on the period in the title.

I had a previous post about misusing pop songs—specifically ones by Radiohead—and of course this movie had to use "Exit Music (For a Film)" over its end credits. First of all, "Exit Music" was written expressly for the end credits of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), so it's already an uninspired idea to use it for end credits again. Secondly ... well, I'm still on a quest to find a movie that uses Radiohead well.

Gender of "tweet"

2010-03-28T14:19:00.006-05:00

Who determines whether the noun "tweet," or any other technological neologism, is masculine or feminine in French? Do these words default to masculine gender (un tweet, un following, le Twitter)? Assuming Twitter will be around for a while, I wonder whether l'Académie française will have to convene a meeting at some point in the future about the gender of "tweet." Or maybe I'm naïve about how they work.

When Movies Kill Your Favorite Songs

2010-02-01T01:43:00.019-06:00

I DO not keep up with popular music, so you'll have to excuse me if I haven't heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. You'll also have to grant me a measure of leniency when I confess that my favorite song recorded in the '00s is probably the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done," an anthem long since overexposed. It is a mainstream hit by a mainstream band by any account, but to me there is something so transcendent in the five minutes of its glowing production and its plaintive declarations. I only regret that its well-known interlude of "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier" is so slick that it invited endless repetition, misappropriation, and ultimately haughty disdain for admirers who think that the song is the best of the decade.

Recently I watched Richard Kelly's Southland Tales in a theater. It was a free screening that 28 people started and 14 finished. Southland Tales had premiered, apparently unfinished, at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival to critical disapproval. While I've never understood the appeal of Kelly's Donnie Darko, I watched Southland with as open a mind as a director would hope his (or her!) audience to have. Just because a film has the most execrable cast after Valentine's Day doesn't mean that I will automatically dismiss it. Similarly, just because a film has Rebekah Del Rio singing some lines in Spanish doesn't mean we have the next Mulholland Dr. on our hands.

So I sat through the whole thing, not letting the literal halving of the audience compel me to walk out on a movie for the first time—and I witnessed Kelly and two-time Emmy winner (because those SNL bits are clearly a high point for television comedy and merit recognition) Justin Timberlake violating the marvelous recording by the Killers with an insipid musical production.

This movie made me think about when good music is squandered in film. Off the top of my head, I have also heard "All These Things"

1) in the trailer for Reign Over Me (because the song says, "You gotta help me out"—see, it fits the theme!);
2) in a Nike commercial (because the "I got soul" refrain will stir the athlete in you); and
3) in überdouche Matt Damon's promo spot for The People Speak (because the song says, "I wanna stand up"—see, it fits the theme!).

The only band I still keep up with is Radiohead, and last year alone I saw the otherworldly "No Surprises" from their masterwork OK Computer played for a scant ten seconds in both Whip It and New York, I Love You. Why use it if you're not going to do anything with it? It is not suitable music to accompany the rekindling of a romance between Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper, nor to set the mood for Ellen Page's blossoming love.

THERE ARE directors like Scorsese, P.T. Anderson, and Tarantino who use pop music so ingeniously that their song choice can become forever linked to the film sequence. From beginning to end, Goodfellas is built on a backbone of pop music: a few highlights are "Then He Kissed Me" over the long take into the Copacabana, "Layla" over the montage of corpse discoveries, and the celebrated "Last Day as a Wiseguy" sequence that (among other techniques) frequently shifts songs to mirror the drug-addled mind of Henry Hill. The opening titles of Mean Streets burst open with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound in "Be My Baby"; Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy is introduced immortally over "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; Casino depicts Sharon Stone's sad demise over "The House of the Rising Sun."

Boogie Nights (Goodfellas for the porn industry) is also propelled forward by its soundtrack, starting with "Best of My Love" heralding Anderson's directorial verve in his virtuoso opening shot. There are too many highlights here as well: "Spill the Wine" over Anderson's I Am Cuba homage; the "Sister Christian"/"Jessie's Girl" Wonderland sequence; the end credits with "Livin' Thing."

Tarantino has managed to assemble eclectic songs along with numerous Ennio Morricone quotations to score films as different as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. When songs are used so adeptly, as is often the case with these three directors, I cannot imagine the music in any other film context. So when "Jumpin' Jack Flash" appears at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or "Livin' Thing" shows up in Chaos Theory, or "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" shows up in the Kung Fu Panda trailer (let alone during every sports event since), I get a little disappointed. To me, cinematic use of such songs is proscribed for a long, long time: they have already been so reverently enshrined by the hands of masters.

Furthermore, I hope that filmmakers will also be responsible with the untapped musical gems that have yet to be consecrated. Please don't use a ten-second Radiohead snippet just because you like the band so much. (Incidentally, I heard ten seconds of "Planet Telex," first track from The Bends, in Southland Tales.) I wait for the day when a filmmaker will use Radiohead felicitously. In spite of my wide-eyed idolatry for Christopher Nolan, I didn't care for Thom Yorke's "Analyse" over the end credits of The Prestige.

WHAT ARE your favorite pop song/film sequence pairings? Are those songs off limits for the foreseeable future? And when have your favorite songs been squandered?

Finally, my top ten of 2009

2010-01-27T13:54:00.008-06:00

After watching The White Ribbon and A Single Man, I think I'm almost caught up.

I still haven't seen all of the '09 movies that I need to see (e.g., Broken Embraces), which is why I have been waiting to post a top ten list. But I know that such lists are ever-shifting anyway—so with multiple disclaimers in effect (I've seen most of these films only once; I don't have the resources to watch everything; I will change my mind four hours after posting), here is my best of 2009.

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. A Serious Man
3. The Hurt Locker (2008)
4. Up in the Air
5. A Prophet
6. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
7. Thirst
8. Departures (2008)
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox
10. Adventureland

Honorable mentions, alphabetically:
(500) Days of Summer, Antichrist, Red Cliff (2008), A Single Man, Sin Nombre, State of Play, Tetro, This Is It, World's Greatest Dad

Worst of 2009
1. Paper Heart

Alphabetically:
Away We Go; Bride Wars; Brothers; Echelon Conspiracy; Fame; New York, I Love You; Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian; The Proposal; Where the Wild Things Are

A Short History of Collecting DVDs

2010-01-13T01:20:00.002-06:00

I submitted this piece to the Chicago Reader on Monday.

A Short History of Collecting DVDs
A mere decade’s worth of innovation in the home video market has changed what it means to collect
11 January 2010

WHEN I was in tenth grade, I won a $250 gift card to Best Buy through a city essay contest. The awarding of the prize was held in the morning, and before my dad drove me back to school, I made him take me straight to Best Buy so that I could spend every dollar. This, of course, was in an age when “recession” and “Suze Orman” were not ingrained in the area of my brain where everyday decisions concerning the satisfaction of wants are made. Were I to stumble upon a windfall like a $250 gift card to Best Buy today, or even a $20 gift card to Chili’s that someone bought for me at CVS along with his cough drops, I would deliberate prudently as to how I could optimize the return on those dollars.

This prize, it turned out, became the seed money for what is now my unwieldy DVD collection. I bought about fifteen movies that day—movies that, to a mind exposed only to American cinema of the 1990s and later, were the greatest of all time: American History X. Requiem for a Dream. Dumb and Dumber. Jerry Maguire, once my number one pick. I did venture a little out of this territory to get The Graduate and also Citizen Kane, which I’d seen once on VHS after it topped the American Film Institute’s first “100 Movies” list. These films, along with the bare-bones Annie Hall that I’d previously bought at a Suncoast store for almost thirty dollars, formed the cornerstone of a library that I would drag with me each time I moved to a new place.

From 2002 to the middle of 2007, I only purchased movies that I truly enjoyed and wanted to be able to watch at will, like Being John Malkovich, the two Kill Bills, and Boogie Nights. This, I assume, was the most common intention when a consumer in the first half of this past decade bought a DVD: to own a certified classic, whether in his eyes or those of the international film community; a childhood memory, the repackaging of some indelible coming-of-age theater experience; or maybe a warm and fuzzy favorite, or a puzzle that had to be revisited. In short, DVDs were not meant to be watched once, and they surely weren’t meant to sit shrink-wrapped in a pile on a random side table at home with their $9.99 price tags intact.

But something happened in the middle of the decade, perhaps as early as 2002 for some people—but for me it was 2007, as I started my first full-time job and lived in my own place: home movies became ridiculously affordable. Consumers could blind-buy new releases, watch them once, and not worry about the inventorial consequences. A DVD is light, compact; its digital content degrades infinitesimally compared to the tape of a videocassette. It is a beautiful product, sure to be a cherished relic of the ’00s. No longer did you have to be a cinephile collecting Criterion laserdiscs to boast a decent film library. Digitizing home video has democratized film education in the same way that digitizing the production, post-production, and distribution of film (with flash-memory HD camcorders, video editing suites, and YouTube, respectively) has democratized filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino and some of his contemporaries famously learned their craft by watching myriad films on VHS, but it’s clear that our present technology makes it even easier today. Thanks to digital media, we can all learn film, and we can all make film.

After my final exams in 2007, I was looking for something to do in the downtime before commencement. Not one to participate in pub crawls, I found, on sale on Amazon, Fellini’s Amarcord and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (the former an excellent reissue; the latter a sumptuous box set for less than thirty dollars!), and my world thenceforth was never the same. In a mere two and a half years, I blind-bought so many classic films through Amazon sales that I bloated my modest Jerry Maguire collection tenfold. I have amassed an inventory so large that a queue of movies was implicitly formed; I will be halfway to retirement before I can find the time to wade through all of them. And that’s assuming I stop collecting DVDs now.

I DID not expect that cessation to occur so soon, but it mostly has. With my very late adoption of Netflix two months ago, there has been another epochal shift in how I watch movies, in what it means personally to collect. At first, I bought the movies I loved. I would pop in my first DVD, Annie Hall, just to hear Diane Keaton sing “Seems Like Old Times” over the wistful final sequence. During the next phase of DVD buying, I acquired movies that I thought were canonical, significant enough to have to be referenced. Imagine the delight to my fledgling-moviegoer mind when I watched Raging Bull and found out that Paul Thomas Anderson had paid homage to its final scene in his own last shot of Boogie Nights. Equipped with my movie arsenal, I could compare “I’m the boss” to “I’m a star” immediately. But the Netflix paradigm goes further for me. I don’t have to reconstruct the film canon in my apartment. I don’t need the physical media cluttering my shelves to make straightforward comparisons. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies obviates the need to even insert a disc into a player, let alone to buy a disc. Netflix is there to collapse my DVD library into a virtual presence, a dynamic list of titles, a collection of bytes.

Need to catch up on the films of Michael Haneke or Jacques Audiard? Rent them all! Aching for a season-four marathon of Punky Brewster? Not a problem! (No, there’s nothing wrong with Punky Brewster. TV on DVD is a marvel unto itself. There’s an episode of The X-Files called “Triangle” that I’ve been dying to see since its first air date in 1998; TV on DVD and Netflix make it possible.)

The digitization of media extends beyond my favorite realm of film. Advances in digital music collapsed a CD and record collection into a pocket-sized iPod filled with mp3 files: long gone are vacations encumbered by a flipbook of CDs, a disc player, and enough AA batteries for a hurricane preparedness kit. The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are poised to try the same for books and print media. But there are portentous implications and difficult questions that come with all this digitization. It’s still hard for me to imagine the obsolescence of the tangible book, the extinction of dust jackets and deckle edges, the fading magnetism of a well-designed trade paperback. But if we ever get there, what can adequately succeed the first edition/first printing of a book, a form of media that has survived so much longer than the DVD will? Will it mean anything to have a Kindle edition of Philip Roth’s latest novel downloaded on release day versus ten years after? I have been buying Pynchon first printings on the chance that my grandchildren will inherit them and think I’m cool. My coolness won’t be on display with an undifferentiated e-book.

For the music industry, in which the transition started long ago, circa Napster days, we might wonder what has become of the conception of the album as a cohesive musical whole. But sadly the album has been dying for a while, as the current business model revolves exclusively around producing a hit single. Look at a list of the number-one singles in any of the past few years and grasp the shrewd efficiency of making money this way: I find it hard to believe that it actually took more than twelve minutes to concoct “3” or “Right Round.” And nowadays the album—that antiquated, lofty notion—can be retooled with “deluxe” or “platinum” editions after the fact to promote a new single not in the original studio release. So what remains of the integrity of the album? Do we really need an upgrade, upgrade of I Am…Sasha Fierce just so that somebody can cash in on her slapdash Lady Gaga remix? Picture Bob Dylan releasing Blonde on Blonde – Deluxe Edition just because he had visions of Rihanna that he wanted to add as a bonus track.

AT THE beginning of the decade, we are on the precipice of what may be an extraordinary expansion of our digital media. Already corporations are coming to grips with the financial ramifications. Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Netflix to delay the rental availability of its titles by one month. How that will increase the revenues from their home video sales, I don’t know. I don’t really need to watch The Hangover the day it appears on Blockbuster and Best Buy shelves. I think distributors simply need to stop worrying and love what is actually an astonishing innovation, and a boon to anyone who loves film. It is an inexorable transition.

There will always be the theater to enjoy that communal moviegoing experience, which Manohla Dargis described recently in regards to Avatar. (I’m proud, for instance, to have screened Antichrist at the Chicago Film Festival, just to have shared in the “experience” of genital mutilation.) And there will also be physical media like Blu-ray or its successors for those who cannot accept anything less than the highest quality at home, unless we can develop the technology to affordably stream the huge amounts of data contained on these discs, too. Incidentally, I am still collecting Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays, which are lovely anyway, “Watch Instantly” be damned.

But my dream is that, by 2020, I will have the option to stream all of my home movies. Film lovers around the world would be able to access some global digital repository to watch The African Queen or Pather Panchali or the restored Metropolis at three in the morning if they wish. We will have made a copy of the corpus of film history from museums, universities, studio vaults, and art houses and pasted it into our homes.