okay well that is pretty boring actually but


i do not understand how what i said was irrelevant.  it was a direct reply to YOUR direct reply to the topic.  what part of that could be off-topic?  unless you mean i am making a bunch of irrelevant comments about you being a cocksucker in which case SURE i'd have to agree.  but if that's not what you mean, and it doesn't seem like it, then i don't understand how my post is somehow not relevant!

are you sure you are using the right word bud???


ps i am acting like a giant prick, but it's not for no reason.  it is because SMUG CONDESCENDING TEENAGERS rate way up there on things that actually make me pretty fucking annoyed.  also it is kind of fun.

well, i guess they're assumptions, but they're not uninformed ones.  most people at gw have broadband, i think, and it's not especially rare for a teenager to own an mp3 player at this point, either.  i'm not assuming that much here!

i actually steered clear of this topic initially because i had a rather lengthy conversation with steel about it and felt that was enough, but i might as well make a big dumb post about it here too.  one could argue that you don't need broadband over dial-up, or that you don't need a pricey mp3 player over a discman, was my point.  you badmouth convenience and yet clearly aren't too threatened by the advent of new technology allowing people to do shit on the go easier, and more quickly. it seemed hypocritical.

anyway, on the topic in general, what i said to steel was that i thought it was unfair to judge things by their screen size alone.  size itself, in this context, is almost totally relative.  have you ever viewed a big screen television from like five feet?  it's ridiculous.  put it way across the room?  more acceptable, and even ideal.  saying "ugh 4" screen......... how am i supposed to enjoy this" i think is kind of a skewed way of looking at it, because 4" sounds a lot smaller than the screen is when it's sitting one foot from your face.  what's more, there's also other things to factor in, such as the tendency of watching a video on ANY screen to draw your focus into it, and kind of inhibit peripheral vision.  the screen, regardless of how small it is, fills a decent portion of your field of vision at the length you hold it from your face.  all this shit combines to imo sort of make the "screen's too small to enjoy anything" a bogus argument.

he also brought up another point, which was overall experience, and this is something other people have had issues with as well.  i admit that for some movies, this is a big deal, and for ALL movies the potential pausing/unpausing that might go on would definitely hamper the experience (but this is why you wouldn't watch MOVIES specifically on things that aren't long commutes).  however!!  for television shows, this has little effect, and even on most movies, the experience isn't really ruined or anything.  what about having a bigger screen DEFINES the movie-going experience?  is jurassic park 3 any better of a movie in theaters than it would be on an iphone?  does having a larger screen enhance the experience that much?

honestly, i do feel that watching shit in theaters makes for a better, more encompassing experience, but that's not what i'm arguing about, really.  i sort of see a double standard here, is all.  is it true that watching LORD OF THE RINGS or some big epic fuck of a movie on your ipod won't be as enjoyable an experience as watching it in the theaters?  yeah, almost assuredly.  but, couldn't the same be said of the difference between the same theater and, you know, normal-sized home televisions and monitors?  i know for a fact that a ton of people at this site and for SURE at least a few in this topic alone regularly watch shit on their computers.  if quality is such an issue, why is it no one seems to apply the same "UGH DESTROYS THE MOVIE" attitude towards avi file divx movies which definitely don't look as good as they would in a theater or if you bought them on dvd and viewed them on your television.  on one hand, you're okay with going from a theater to a television/monitor, and enduring the loss of quality that comes with ripping shit and even cams sometimes; but on the other hand, you object to the loss of quality you have to deal with when viewing it on a screen that, while smaller, is substantially closer to your eyes?  it's odd, because a movie probably suffers more when going from the theater to the tv/monitor than from the tv/monitor to the ipod.

so yeah i guess for some movies the LOSS OF EXPERIENCE might be a factor, but i feel like if a movie's experience is really engineered around the fact that it will be viewed in a movie theater, then the same would apply to dvds and movies you torrent, which definitely do not get the same amount of flack even though they're essentially based, at least in part, on the same principle (loss of quality/experience vs convenience), which strikes me as odd.  furthermore, that's still not ALL movies, and ones that are not WHOAA EPIC BATTLE SCENE do not even really suffer from the transition if you do not maintain some narrow-minded conception of a screen having to be a certain size for something to be conveyed.  also!!  none of this applies to television at all, and that fact alone makes it a pretty feasible technology imo, as watching an episode of arrested development on the bus is still appealing to me.  so i guess i am kind of confused as to why some of you bitches are so vehemently opposed to the idea.  i've watched a few movies/random shows on my zune in boring circumstances and unlike what steel seems to be saying i wasn't astounded at the lack of quality/detail it showed.  once you let your attention get sucked into the screen to the point where it's basically all you are paying attention to, at such a distance, it really isn't that much worse than watching something on your computer or television.  quality-wise, compressed dvd rips still look like... compressed dvd rips.  the limited amount of pixels the small screens have do hinder special effects and shit a lot of the time, but aside from that it's mostly the same level of quality.

I mentioned this earlier, but yeah dude, I held my ipod sideways and pretended the whole thing was a screen and held it a foot away from my face and it still was a fourth of the size of my laptop screen which was more than two feet away. it's not that there's some hypocrisy about watching movies on a laptop but honestly at that point it's kind of getting a little too small and a little more into the realm of insanely small.

I think Lynch's statement has to do with an idea that you glossed over in favor of talking about tv; the idea of film as something ON THE GO, this concept of flash, sellable, entertainment. for someone like Lynch, who wouldn't even put a chapter by chapter menu in his movie, the idea of stop and go movies no doubt is repulsive.

that and Lynch has been around the block to see how technology has affected film. when DVD became popular, we started seeing not just director's commentaries but occasionally movies almost DESIGNED for director's commentaries. the feature affected the film. I bet he percieves the creation of these micro movie players as a trend towards flash entertainment; movies you don't need to be invested in and can just watch while waiting for class to start and pause as you go.

now my head hurts for some reason I hope I made sense.

this is actually a really good point.  but the thing is, at best, this is a niche market of movies.  AT BEST.  it's something people will always prefer watching things on their televisions or in theaters to.  dvd commentary became popular, and what happened?  people realized that viewers had an interest in direct actor/director perspective on their own movies and started including it basically all the time.  okay!  and apparently a few films were sort of made with director commentary foremost in mind.  do you truly think that this will affect the movie industry in any real way?  MOVIES in any real way?  watching things on your psp/iphone?  it's purely secondary on all this shit, and like i said it just doesn't seem like it's the same as director commentary.  that worked very well because who doesn't own a dvd player, and who doesn't regularly watch movies in their homes?  this answer is way way way less than people who do not own ipods and commute or otherwise sit around bored but at the same time do not want to listen to music and as such will watch movies.  it doesn't really seem like a large enough market to make a real splash!  plus is that really a reason to dislike a technology that works even if you don't factor in movies?

but at the same time, i understand why it's kind of horrifying because OHGOD THE CONDEMNED MINIMOVIES 20 minutes of non-stop action a piece only $5 on umd this week:  conrad vs the apes.  but on the other hand!! i sort of think the idea of not necessarily hyper-portable short-length media (this is kind of a gross evolution of movies for the sake of travel/convenience/busyshopper on the go i agree!) but of 20- or 30-minute-long movies is kind of cool and something i wish would be explored more.  it's true it would lead to a lot of portable-intended garbage but i also think that there are a bunch of cool things you could do for such short movies, especially because the intrinsically lower production cost of something so brief seems like it would lend itself to smaller movie makers with maybe more interesting ideas than JOHN CENA: THE MARINE: PORTABLE or whatever most of the shit hollywood would put out would be who could not ordinarily afford to make entire movies but might be able to swing miniature ones!  and that's IF the whole on the go minimovie thing caught on, which again, i really do not think it will.