Miscellaneous: King of the Silver Screen

Stephen King names his ten best movies of 2006 in Entertainment Weekly. I love King’s column: the odds of any other writer for a mass-market magazine singling out the old-school ‘70s-style urban action flick Waist Deep for year-end honors are mighty slim. I missed Waist Deep in theaters, but I’ll make a point of watching it now. King knows whereof he speaks when it comes to pulp.

Still, I can’t get behind his central thesis that it’s harder to go out to movies with all the media options now available. I know it’s true, but I can’t get behind it. The whole "let’s binge on an entire TV season in a single weekend pausing only to order Chinese and attend to biological urges" thing eludes me. But apparently only me; in the same EW issue, no less a celestial being than Oprah Winfrey claims that on a recent Saturday she never took her pj’s off and consumed 13 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in one sitting.

Don’t get me wrong. I use technology to my advantage. I powered through the fourth season of The Wire on my schedule via On Demand. But I move at my own erratic – read: slow – pace. If I tried to compress all of Battlestar Galactica Season Two into a long weekend I’d go to bed the way I did every Halloween of my childhood, having gorged on candy: feeling kind of shaky and not a little bit greasy.

Plus there are some movies that have to be seen on the big screen if you have any interest in them. I’m sure Waist Deep will play just fine in the living room at Chez K. But King admits he was too busy watching Jericho on his computer to check out Clint Eastwood’s WWII epic Flags of Our Fathers. When he catches up with Flags, which I liked, on video – or if he goes to see the companion film Letters from Iwo Jima, now garnering huge acclaim – he’s going to be kicking himself no matter how big his home theater is.