Vintage Sand

In a “New York Times” article published last month, Ross Douthat expounded on the provocative idea that the movies, as in studio films produced in Hollywood, were “over.” He was not arguing that Hollywood would ever stop producing movies for the big screen, nor that the notion of seeing a movie in a dark theater with strangers all around would ever completely disappear. Instead, he was saying that The Movies, the heart of American popular culture for over a century, has now become just another source of content in a world of seemingly endless content. He attributes this to the rise of streaming and the improved quality of what we can see on our screens at home, to a globalized market that rewards the exploitation of familiar properties over anything that might be truly innovative, and, to be fair, the expense and sheer unpleasantness of taking one’s family to see a movie in an actual theater. And since most of what was on offer in the big theaters was Marvel/DC multiverse epics, other tentpole/franchise films