Staying In
Staying In is a series that focuses on films our writers have viewed at home through all forms of digital distribution, from cable on demand to downloads to instant streaming.
His new film is certainly underwhelming in my living room, but it’s hard to imagine The Zero Theorem would be much to look at in a theater either, so uninspired are its futuristic images, the likes of which we’ve grown well accustomed to since the days of Blade Runner.
The slight shiver of excitement I habitually feel when sitting down to watch a new Ken Loach film is amplified on this occasion by a simple coincidence of dates: I am about to view Route Irish at home on my laptop, on the same day that it’s released in cinemas across the UK.
Salut les cubains is neither masterwork nor grand failure; it’s too slight to be either. What it does do, which is valuable, is make visible the blind spots not only in her approach to political filmmaking but by association that of her French New Wave contemporaries.
Don Roos’s The Other Woman promised to make for an appealingly middlebrow hour and a half in front of the tube (may I still call it that?), and which, in description, reminded me of all of those 1980s and early 1990s female-centric domestic dramedies studios used to churn out.
How about a very early computer-age romantic comedy, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, called Desk Set? It’s hardly obscure, but I’d never seen it. Click, boom, presto. Instantly, it begins.
Newer modes of viewing require us to make decisions about what kinds of films we are willing to watch in nontraditional formats. It would be senseless to watch a widescreen epic like Lawrence of Arabia on a tablet device, yet many may choose to do so.