6.01.2013

The Palm Goes Digital

Which sucks, but that's capitalism for ya.
Digital is nicer for the big corps, so as with the vinyl/cd transition digital is what we get, quality of broadcast be damned. 

I caught 'From Up on Poppy Hill' recently, and while I enjoyed the movie the cinema experience wasn't- the image didn't feel alive to me, it was flat & dead like watching a really gigantic television.  Projected film vibrates with life, digital does not.  To me it's like the difference between standing on the seashore or beside a lake- crashing surf vs. a mild pulsation.

I'm absolutely an iconoclast when it comes to the whole analog/digital 'thing', whatever form it takes.  The switchover is irresistible- you can't show what the studios don't produce.  I can grasp the business realities while continuing to condemn them from the consumer sidelines.   The further theaters retreat from the utopian vision of being artisinal movie palaces, the more like giant living rooms they become, the likelier it is I'll stay home and wait for a movie to drift past, leaf like, on the stream.

When the quality of the cinematic image is no different in the movie house than in your living room the question becomes a simple one of scale rather than a complex one of a living image vs. a compressed and processed one. 

And that decision is an easy one for a homebody like me to make.

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