The Two Joes

I need to state clearly that Joe Popcorn and Joe Download are more or less the same person. Okay, they’re somewhat different but Joe Popcorn has been slowly morphing into Joe Download over the last four or five years because it’s easier and cheaper to stay home. They just want to sit back and be entertained by movies written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, or better yet sit at home and watch these movies on their 60″ LED or LCD screens. (They aren’t hip enough to buy a plasma.) And they don’t care if it’s download or DVD quality or whatever. Bluray means nothing to them.

The Two Joes just want to sit there and watch and eat pizza and laugh and text their friends during the film and…you know, relax and have a good time and scratch their balls.

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  • Aaron

    Seems like a broad generalization. The market is changing, but there is always a market for quality. And there is a limit for how dumb the studio conglomerates can make the films before audiences revolt. Who knows what the tipping point will be? Perhaps as global literacy increases, so will the global appetite for better-made films. Just taking a look at the Oscar nominees, the Foreign Film category often has a richness of stories to it that is sorely lacking in the Best Picture category.

    • Bobby Cooper

      The point has tipped. The goddamn plane has crashed into the mountain. There will be no audience revolt because of learned helplessness/hopelessness from years of mind-deadening programming. “Eh, it’s fine. You’re too critical. People seem to like it. Just look at the ads/awards/reviews/returns.”

      Studios and the consortium of conglomerates that control them view the John Calley-type of exec as a water-walker who’ll lose as much money as he makes pushing projects with rough edges, weight, and authority. Better stick to the pap or consult a publishing affiliate with a third-rate potboiler they’ve got to pump and dump.

  • spp23

    how is buying a plasma hip? it feels more like an extension of wells’ favorite logic structure: i am hip, i own a plasma, therefore plasmas are hip.

    (not to mention: who actually uses the word hip?)

  • http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/ Jeffrey Wells

    So it’s okay to use the word “hipster” but you can’t say “hip.” Check.

  • http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/ Jeffrey Wells

    It is believed in some quarters that plasma screens render the most cinematic- or celluloid-looking looking images while LED and LCD screens are thought to render images that are little more digital- or video-game looking. I’m just repeating what others have told me. Yes, I have a plasma.

    • DimitriL

      Plasma isn’t hip. OLED is hip.

  • Actually

    I went from seeing 60+ films a year in the theater as recently as 2008 to seeing 5, 10 tops. Why? Because 50 of those movies aren’t worth seeing in a theater at ANY price when I can enjoy them at home.

    As much as Jeff hates the thought, the only movies worth seeing in the theater are those big and loud CGI blockbusters because they’re the only movies that exploit the big screen experience. It was nice to see Argo in a theater, but you lose nothing seeing Argo on your TV at home. The same can’t be said for The Dark Knight Returns.

    Oh, and LEDs and even plenty of recent LEDs are better than plasmas, period. The “plasmas are better” was true as recently as five years ago when crappy LCDs and DLPs that couldn’t do true blacks dominated the market, but that is no longer true today. Get a better “others”, Jeff.

    • Raising_Kaned

      Are you watching these flicks alone at home, though?

      One of the most essential parts of watching films in a theater is the communal experience. This is what makes movies movies, and differentiates them from television (which gets its communal kick from the “water cooler” talk afterward), or video games (which are becoming more solitary experiences, with the exception of the rare “multiplayer in the same room” scenario).

      You can definitely make the argument that going out to the movies isn’t even a true communal experience any longer because the audience is dwindling to such a degree as to make it a moot point.

      Which is fair enough, but at what point does this type of thinking become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts?

      Are you sure that you don’t “lose anything” by watching Argo — or even Amour (as opposed to TKDR or Star Trek) at home? I feel like there’s an intangible quality that you might be underrating here, but I’m not 100% convinced that it actually exists, either.

      That’s why I’m asking.

    • Gnome Sayin

      The newer LED sets have come a very long way, but only the truly high end ones tend not to suffer from some combination of garish unnatural colors, backlight bleeding, etc. The most universally lauded displays for color accuracy, contrast, etc. are still plasmas. No consumer television of any kind has even approached the quality of the Pioneer Kuro plasmas last manufactured in 2008.

      You can find an excellent LED if that’s your thing, but there are a lot of very problematic ones. Mid-range plasmas tend to beat mid-range LEDs, for a few hundred dollars less.

  • what

    You like the motion settings on HD televisions and don’t understand composition. You’re not allowed to comment on this stuff. Your opinion is automatically fucked.