‘Spectre,’ among other cinematic fantasies, just isn’t same on a laptop
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If I’ve been glowing lately, the flattering autumnal light is only part of it. It’s also the residual effect of seeing the latest James Bond movie, “Spectre,” last week.
I’m no more likely than the next guy to relate to 007. Which is to say completely—as he vanquishes evil in one breath and beautiful women in the next, all in the name of truth, justice and the Anglo-American way.
Though that conceit has become more challenging to maintain as the years go on. And only partly because I’m aging out of the secret-agent demographic.
It’s more that the special-effects situations Bond finds himself in—the car chases and their collateral damage to urban infrastructure, the nuclear missiles he manages either to duck or defuse, and the brain trauma he has to be suffering as he gets tossed around by sadistic henchmen, all without noticeable effect on his ability to deliver a bon mot—demand that one stretch credulity well beyond the breaking point.
No, the reason I feel fondly toward the flick several days later is because of the magic of the movies when viewed on a large screen in a full house—in this case the IMAX at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13. And in the middle of New York City. That’s important, too.
If only because it makes me recollect the circumstances—when, where and with whom—of movies I’ve seen in the past. Some of them even made a lasting impression, though few starring James Bond, which seem to blend into one another, especially lately.
I’d be lying if I denied that attending a screening and managing to circumvent the $21.59 cost, plus the $2 “convenience fee,” didn’t also contribute to my sense of well-being.
I recently attended a discussion about the state of the movie industry at the FilmColumbia Festival in the Hudson Valley, where the panelists—led by Peter Biskind, the journalist, film historian and the festival’s organizer—lamented that millennials are watching movies on their computers rather than going to movie houses.
Part of the pleasure of “Spectre” in IMAX is that you feel at the center of the action. Perhaps too much so.
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You’re present in a way you never are when you control the experience on your computer or TV, knowing you can pause the image whenever you want to get a snack, take a phone call or go to the bathroom.
No matter how stimulating a film, there’s no way it can hijack the senses on a 13-inch screen the way it does in a movie house, where it seems to envelope you (even though, through the walls, you might hear the rumble of zombie tanks in the adjoining theater.)
The first Bond film, and perhaps the first grown-up film, I saw was “Goldfinger” in 1964 at a movie house in Times Square. I went with my babysitter and her boyfriend. And since the showing was sold out, we were forced to sit separately. Or maybe they planned it that way, because it was obviously easier to be amorous without me in the next seat.
But I remember feeling like an honorary adult as I watched Bond dispatch villains behind the wheel of fully equipped Aston Martin, even if I didn’t completely connect the cause of Jill Masterson’s death to “skin suffocation” from being covered head to toe in gold paint.
Another developmental leap I owe to the movies occurred in 1969, when I attended a weekend screening of “Easy Rider” with Douglas Tishman, a high-school classmate.
Emerging from the movie—I believe it was at the Beekman Theater on 67th Street and Second Avenue—I felt euphoric, perhaps for the first time a card-carrying member of my own generation. In 95 minutes I’d gone from being an innocent high school nerd to a knowing hippie.
I suspect the experience wouldn’t have been the same if I’d exited onto a parking lot in a suburban multiplex. It was New York City. The lights, crowds and traffic—the very future—seemed to burn more brightly.