The only alternatives to actually watching the physical film were film books that looked like fumetti, or you and your neighborhood pals acting out what you remembered from the flim.

I kinda miss the old days when memory helped you along with the mental processing of the film. Also, the fact that sometimes the first time you saw a flim in the cinema was the only time you saw it before it was chopped up and delivered to tv made you pay more attention to what you were watching, because you knew it was a kind of special event.

The art of story telling was encouraged by the inability of more than one person at a time being able or allowed to go the the cinema. The art of drawing and painting and that other stuff was encouraged by the inability of a viewer to view the flim more than a couple times before it was mailed to the next converted horse stable in the theatre chain. The graphic intensity of flim and memory led to the reenactment of favorite scenes and the recreation of favorite sets or locales. The phonograph allowed the viewer to listen to bits of the noisetrack or pieces of dialogue, monologue and Kylie... nevermind.

Today's whelps are inundated with videos, DVDs, CDs, Roms, Rams, and whim-whams. From the moment their mum pushes them out, or even before with those stupid headphones for fetusi that some mummies pump Mozart or Mos Def through in order to condition the zygotes to a world that doesn't sound like an intestinal orgy with a thumpy bass backbeat...

Today's whelps are inundated with images, sounds, and products that were considered obscene, unnecessary and unobtainable just thirty years ago. Today's whelps can be propped up in front of a PC or a notebook lapdog computer as soon as their eyes begin to focus and they learn to oppose their thumbs and programmes are available to help the tykettes to MAKE THEIR OWN MOVIES, complete with credits, fade-ins, fade-outs, irises and noisetracks.

So, within a solid century, the movie has made its way from a fantasy in the pants of a few weirdos with an odd gleam in their eye, to an omnipresent reality for every two year old who wants to direct.

Also, within a solid century, the movie catalog has grown from a few hundred thousand that mostly and gratefully either spontaneously combusted or turned to dust to a humongous library of millions of titles from around the world. Since most TV shows are filmed and comprise short movies in and out of themselves, and they are being recycled and reproduced with the same enthusiasm as classic films on the new DVD format, they, too are recluded in the total. TV became the second tier theatre when films began to be shown on the small screen for those who couldn't stand to use a strange bathroom or couldn't bear technicolour on a cowardly lion...

THE TRULY SAD THING IS...

that over the century, scriptwriters and screen directors have not improved measurably and producers are mostly still either dilletantes (sp?)or used fur coat (or car) salesmen who want to do something 'cuhlchured' with their money.

You can watch a movie made in the early teens and marvel at the cinematography, the angles and the acting, despite the cute title cards and the disgusting organ in your ear. You can watch a musical from the early minutes of sound film and be amazed at how well the instruments are recorded and how useful the vocals are. You can watch a movie made last week with the latest digital special effects and wonder whether you can get your money and your lost respiration back...

WHICH REMINDS ME...

I wonder when Woody Allen is going to get around to that spoof he was going to make of the Christopher Guest films... Starring Paul Reubens as Rex Reed and Gwyneth Paltrow as Pauline Kael....

Git-R-Dun!