4:27:25

The Doors, 1991

The reason I stay away from most new movies is because of how much I love the old ones. While this is something cinephiles and most people refuse to admit, or even acknowledge, there is no way a culture as stupid, programmed, talentless, and ruined as ours, along with the lunatic contemporary actors (ideologues) who star in them, can possibly make anything worth watching at this point (there might be some rare exceptions, of course). It’s a dead art. Which gives us more time and permission to go back and see things again. Before the past few years (post-COVID), I rarely watched a movie multiple times, unless it was a favorite, or I had to study a film for work—I was teaching it or writing about it. I always felt the pressure of time, the pressure to keep up (movies are long. You can only watch a couple a day, which is what I did for twenty years) with new movies. Now all that pressure for what is new—for what is coming next—is gone. And I am free. It turns out the digital did not kill cinema—although it did kill celluloid, which is indeed one aspect of its death. Its material, its texture, its light, its form—Hollywood and Wokeness did. Selfies and Instagram stories did. And, I would add, viewers and critics, by allowing it. By forgetting the difference. By lowering all their standards. Great critics create high standards.

We don’t need actors to be everywhere, to leak out. We only need them in movies, where they belong. But the cat is out of the bag and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

“No time to wallow in the mire.” (The Doors, Light My Fire)