Welcome to the Multiplex

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it." Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

I read somewhere that there are nearly 10 million active blogs in the United States right now. If you enter the word "movie" in the search field of this blogger website you get 3,592,890 posts containing the word.

It's not always easy to be a moviegoer. The crowds can be soul-wrenchingly rude, most movies don't live up to the media machine that precedes them, and it is now more expensive to take a family of four see a movie than it is to fly one-way from Dulles to Orlando.

Not to mention that movies these days seem less and less interested in digitally removing the strings of commerce that have propped up movie "artistry" since the days of Mary Pickford silently wailing on the railroad tracks.
(Today Mary would still be tied to the tracks, but with "Bungee" brand cords, tastefully dressed in Vera Wang while the Amtrak logo bears down on her.)

Before you get the wrong idea, I understand it is all a business. It has always been a business of rich getting richer, since before the days of the studio system, all the way down to Chloe shilling "Acuvue" on Smallville.

All last year the industry was quaking in their editing rooms because receipts were down. Some of the powers that be are now convinced (rightfully so) that a great change in American entertainment is coming. It's probably true, Netflix, Myspace, Filesharing (read: piracy) programs like bittorrent and Kazaa, PSPs, digital pay-per-view, Ifilm, The Movies, Google video, and so many other forces looking to change the way we watch movies. Independent video stores are dying out, only niche markets and heavyweight chains large enough to compete in the growing online market will be able to survive.

Signs of a response to this change have begun. Steven Soderbergh's dual theater/DVD release of Bubble is one of the developing responses to out of control digital piracy and empty theatres.

It's true that not everything is well in the state of Hollywood. The internet is a tornado of Chicken Little dialogue from hundreds of thousands of pundits, critics, bloggers, fanboys and fanatics heralding the death of good cinema. While I agree, quality is down, my philosophy (which, admittedly, may be naive) is that if you want movies that you like to be made, you have to GO to the movies, you have to PAY to see the film, so that film you like MAKES MONEY. If you do that, movie makers are more likely to MAKE MORE MOVIES YOU LIKE.

It may be a bit simplistic, but it is a little like voting, if you don't go to the movies and spend the money to support the process, then you have no right to complain when you don't like your choices.

For this reason my appreciation for the act of will that a film represents will not be dulled. No matter how many Uwe Boll masterpieces are shoehorned onto the big screen, or how many sequels to Fantastic Four (2005) bloom and wither in the pantheon, I will still love the movies. And I will continue to support film projects and actors that I enjoy, in the hope that my support, both critical and financial will insure their continued success.

That being said.

This blog is dedicated to ALL movies, good, bad, foreign, independent, classic, in production; pre- to post-, tent-poles, vanity projects, fast-tracked fiascos, on-hold arthouse films, shelved erotic suspense sequels, re-written, re-cast and postponed period pieces, buzzworthy biopics, daring director's-cut dramas and direct-to-market Disney, unrated animated award-winning shorts and more.