Movies on puny phones

Sit here on the porch, little Timmy. Let me tell you a tale.

In my day, we downloaded. MP3 files off Napster on a 56k connection, and we liked it. To download a Papa Roach song, it’d take an hour of uninterrupted AOL connection.

God help you if your parents signed you off accidentally by using the house phone.
After a song was downloaded, you’d celebrate by riding your horse to the local dime store, where you could buy a soda for a nickel.

To the freshmen Googling on their smart phones to find out if this story is true: This is an exaggeration used for the intent of comedy.

It boggles my mind to think some of you younglings weren’t fully functioning during the dark ages of file sharing.

There was once a time when the internet was a Mad Max wasteland. Scary men in leather masks roamed the digital tubes, fighting for scarce reserves of fuel and your e-mail accounts.

We’ve become spoiled on the cornucopia of file sharing. This goes beyond the plight of the entertainment industry, who even the most die-hard internet pirate has to admit has been hurt financially.

The excess of choice and ease of access has turned viewing habits into the equivalent of going to a Ponderosa. You take more food than you’ll ever eat, and you find yourself not even thinking about what you’re shoveling into your mouth. That guy across the room has had three plates already, and you must beat him.

Maybe this is just me. I have the entire discography and ten different live sets of Paul Simon. They sit on my hard drive untouched. Perhaps they detail the location of a lost treasure. We’ll never know.

While I’ve always triumphed the convenience of technology (thanks Tivo, you recorded the Victoria’s Secret fashion show for me so I can watch it whenever I want!), work and other commitments find a way to fill in any free time we’ve created.

Before the Pandora’s box of cell phones, you could only be contacted at work if you were at the office.

Your mini laptop becomes a tether to your job. We have no excuses for why we didn’t get the memo at 11 p.m. Now, it’s acceptable to have business meetings through your portable device as you drive to the office.

Every step we take to give us some wiggle room will only become tighter and tighter – like quicksand.

Not only is our time constricted, but the quality of our enjoyment is diminished.
Are you really enjoying watching Mad Men on the bus through a tiny iPhone screen?

I’m an advocate of legal TV-streaming sites like Hulu, but sitting hunched over my computer desk is not an equivalent viewing experience to sitting on a comfortable couch with an arm around your current mistress.

If you watch a shaky bootleg of a movie on the Internet, you did not see the film.
Director/writer/wizard David Lynch once said, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.”
You have to trust his words. The man made a movie about a guy riding a lawn mower.