The funWife and I went to Hollywood Video, rented 3 movies and bought Raiders of the Lost Ark (AKA Indiana Jones I) for $8.50 last night. Yes, that’s the cost of one person seeing one movie, but there were coupons involved. Still, it does help explain why fewer people are seeing movies at the theater these days.
When we saw Revenge of the Sith, it was at a new theater which touts the largest screen in the midwest. And it was a large screen by today’s standards, but as I informed the Fruit of the Murphy Loins, it would have been an average screen when I was even a teenager. Thankfully the shoe-box theaters that were built during my 20’s and 30’s are disappearing, replaced by the stadium seating theaters. I guess the owners realized that people weren’t willing to pay a lot of money to see a movie on a screen only marginally larger than their TV at home and in the company of strangers. I’m also noticing that people are talking less during movies, maybe because they don’t feel like they’re in their living room anymore.
I do like movies, and the movies today are able to do things technically and thus make movies that are beyond what once could be done. Compare Master and Commander to Horatio Hornblower, and you’ll see what I mean — although I do have a soft spot in my heart for the scene in HH where the two ships are bearing down on each other with every sail unfurled and filled with the wind. Physically impossible, but it sure looks good as long as you don’t think. But along the way Hollywood seems to have replaced dialogue and plot with action and CGI. Can’t we have all four? Dialogue written today doesn’t come close to what was routinely written well into the seventies.
And that brings us to Hitch, the movie we watched last night. It’s a very pleasant movie, and Will Smith is quite believable as a smooth talking charmer and he does have some funny bits. The problem is not enough Kevin James. Kevin lights up the screen and provides lots of laughs, but Will Smith is the star, so we have to see lots of him and Eva Mendes even though we pretty much now how that story line is going to go. And there’s your economics in a nutshell – I got a bargain at 99 cents for the funWife and I to rent the movie, and I’d have been unhappy to pay $17 for us to see it in a theater.
