In the backrow of the movies ...

This guy, not to confused with Mr. New World Symphony, likes watching movies at home.

Now with the DVD and the so-called home theater, the average experience is simply better at home. You can stop the movie when you want. You can eat dinner while watching. You can pause the movie and examine a scene more closely. The only thing you really miss is the group experience of sitting in an audience with a hundred or more strangers who react to the film, which is an important form of socialization. Of course, that experience has to be balanced by the idiot with the hat sitting in front of you or the girl who keeps getting up every five minutes to go to the bathroom or make a call.

Did Huston, Ford, Leone, Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, Truffaut, Bergman et al, really make movies to be paused at will; make movies to go with steak tartare; make movies to go with Tuscan soup. I think these considerations passed the great auteurs by.

Ok there are downsides to cinemas:

• smells of crappy food.
• mobile phones ringing.

but you also have to look at the upsides

• feeling an emotion as part of a largish group.
• isolation from telephones, cats, and as Eric puts it, "small people".

And being part of large group laughing, crying, sitting on the edge of your sets, and having the other emotions you have in a cinema is a G-O-O-D thing.

Even a collective recognition that this movie is over-rated tosh can be a G-O-O-D thing.

For further discussion see Norm and Eric.