I used to live, eat, drink, breathe, and smoke heavy movies, the heavier the better — Fassbinder festivals really were festive for me — but more and more I find I just can’t do it. Or, rather, I can but I constantly need to break the tension. It’s weird. Or maybe it isn’t. The cultural legacy of capital-C cinema — the mythologies of immersion, of submission to the auteur, of the box made black not with paint but with a brilliant screen — is one of those self-referential staples of modernism that’s so sacrosanct that it’s very hard to think outside of. Against that storied backdrop, just curling up in bed with an ipad and watching something seems hopelessly… I dunno exactly… hopelessly that swill of modern anxieties about mediocrity, inauthenticity, superficiality. But, really, why? Is there any good reason that being stuck in the dark with a bunch of strangers should be more “real” than watching something on an ipad in your own space and on your own time? And maybe that impulse to step outside of it — to check this, go make that, do this other thing — is just User-Generated Brechtian Distancing (UGBD).