Manohala Dargis | AO Scott
Manohala Dargis
I Watchdate to My Eyes Blade
It was a year of small and tiny screens watching the chaos despite lies. On a lost day a while ago, I spent an awful (embarrassing!) 11 hours and 15 minutes on my phone. I read the news, Twitter scrolled, did puzzles, checked my email and kept scrolling. No wonder my eyes started to ache regularly and sometimes sting, asking me to worry that I needed a new prescription for my glasses. I didn’t, I just needed to stop looking, but I couldn’t put my phone down, which made me like the big world I missed so much.
The point of the top 10 list is to share our favorite movies. But thinking about my favorite of the year and the many new and old titles I’ve seen, I also thought a lot about how to watch movies and, just, just Saw. Big screen fanatics, I love going to the movies, first- and second-run cinemas, as well as art houses, museums and cinemas. I know which theaters and studios in Los Angeles (where I live) have the biggest screens, the best sounds, the sights and the seats – I, I prefer to sit in the middle of the theater, fully focused.
I cried when movie theaters closed in Los Angeles in March. (They’re still off.) Critics’ tears are small, but moving who I am. I saw a lot of movies in New York in the 1970s, including TV. But going to the movies was my first adventure in sovereignty, a way I experienced exploring normal life without parental supervision. Moving was my thing, the way to look and be. Until March, it was also an occasion for me to understand the time, its shape, texture and demand: MovingGang decided what it did overnight, which included several hours of screening and driving.
Like many people, partly because of how I experience time now. This year I’m tired of something. I’ve been working from home for a long time, but to review movies, I go to theaters. So I found it challenging to learn while watching the movies being reviewed at home, how to respect their necessary and worthy attention, how to sit – and sit – how to sit on the sofa and not press the pause button, not check Twitter. It couldn’t help that we have so many windows, which made it impossible to duplicate the dark screening room, even though the shades were drawn. So, to top it all off, I hung the sheets over the shades and even tapped the trader’s shopping bag on a small window, which was as ridiculous as it sounds.
