Feeling | Can Flicks Survive Changing Situations?

To the Editor:

Re “Is This the End of the Movies?,” by Ross Douthat (column, Sunday Evaluation, March 27):

Why are pundits so keen to publish the obituaries of parts of our lifestyle that insert so numerous enriching dimensions to our lives? The radio was intended to kill textbooks the net was intended to eliminate the newspaper tv was meant to eliminate theater YouTube was meant to kill tv.

All of these joyful, irreplaceable areas of our lifestyle have survived despite pundits’ finest endeavours to bury them, and so way too will the movies. Like the novel, the newspaper, the engage in and tv, the films will endure. What will improve is how we expertise them.

Daniel Ross Goodman
Longmeadow, Mass.
The writer is a motion picture critic for The Washington Examiner and the creator of “Somewhere Around the Rainbow: Speculate and Religion in American Cinema.”

To the Editor:

I have not been to a movie in a theater for extra than 20 a long time, way in advance of Covid. Why? The interminable adverts, the stink of phony butter on popcorn, the seats, the peering in between people today taller than me. Most of all, the ridiculously loud sound stages.

About 10 years back, I purchased a very costly projector, a 7-foot-large pull-down monitor, an audio-online video receiver and six fantastic loudspeakers. Since then, we can happily stream flicks from the standard internet websites or community library, and we can lease or buy DVDs.

So why go to a movie theater at all? Situation closed.

Jolyon Jesty
Mount Sinai, N.Y.

To the Editor:

When sensible journalists predict the end of films, they really necessarily mean that flicks are shifting in dimension, format, articles, earnings and system.

My only quibble with Ross Douthat’s wonderful piece is his use of the alarmist “End of the Films.” Motion pictures have survived every single new technology from audio to the website about additional than a century.

If anything has ended, it is the primacy of flicks as customers’ first decision. The Iphone introduced an personal way to observe movies, but also introduced a numbing wide variety of competing written content, thieving several hours absent from motion picture theater attendance.

The motion picture company will evolve and flourish as executives, reps and talent survive this disruptive interval, the one particular-two punch of streaming and Covid. For consumers indifferent to display sizing, there have hardly ever been much more alternatives. For expertise, there has hardly ever been much more get the job done, globally. This is an unbeatable blend.

Jason E. Squire
Los Angeles
The writer is professor emeritus at the U.S.C. Faculty of Cinematic Arts and editor of “The Movie Business enterprise Reserve.”

To the Editor:

I was ready for somebody somewhere to seem the death knell. And Ross Douthat did it masterfully. I was not waiting joyfully, of course.

I grew up with Roy Rogers and Gene Autry Saturday matinees. The practically all-day party (which could not have set my individuals again extra than a buck) gave me entree to the grownup entire world, fantasy, songs, information, comedy. Tv didn’t truly contend for a while. And then it did. And then the flicks did not appear like the “must see” they experienced been.

It is been a lengthy time coming, but did not the marketplace dig its very own grave with overblown, extremely prolonged, pretentious movies that started to experience missable?

This is coming from a movie lover who searches for 1 additional black and white film noir that she could have skipped from the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s most nights. And when she finds one, it’s seen in considerably less than two hours. That is a advertising stage!

Frances Sheridan Goulart
Ridgefield, Conn.

‘We Count on Supreme Integrity From the Court’

To the Editor:

Re “Election Texts Glow New Light on Clout Held by Justice’s Wife” (entrance web page, March 27):

Main Justice John Roberts can no longer disguise. The Supreme Court’s rotting standing has accelerated in latest days, with the unsigned, commentless conclusions supplying way to news about an affiliate justice, Clarence Thomas, whose ethical perform is deservedly beneath rigorous scrutiny.

We expect supreme integrity from the courtroom. We need to have it, but we’re not acquiring it.

Main Justice Roberts desires to impose controls, and he wants to make them loud and distinct so the nation understands that it can as soon as once more have confidence in the court docket. For those people justices who just can’t stay below a stringent code of ethics, exit stage appropriate.

Honesty. Actually, that is not a good deal to ask.

Jay Margolis
Delray Beach front, Fla.

Reading through ‘Dirty’ Shakespeare

To the Editor:

Re “Florida Governor Symptoms Invoice Fought by L.G.B.T.Q. Teams, White Dwelling and Hollywood” (information short article, March 29):

When I (now 73) was in elementary school, my school assigned censored editions of Shakespeare with the “dirty” bits omitted. The initially issue we did was to get unedited editions from libraries and older siblings so we could assess the editions and locate the censored bits. I truthfully do not recall how significantly time I expended on the “clean” pieces.

At excellent hurt to the skill of lecturers and educators to help children navigate the ever more complicated and scary territory of fashionable identity, social everyday living, medicine and, indeed, sexuality, legislatures like Florida’s are sending young ones straight to significantly less reputable but at any time-existing sources of info about these subjects, censoring lecturers and purging faculty libraries and curriculums.

Younger persons without having all set accessibility to option facts resources are becoming despatched straight into the ready rooms of faculty counselors, who are legislatively muzzled and consequently mainly not able to assistance them.

How dare legislators (with the fake assert that they are aiding young children and mothers and fathers) mail us all back to the Middle Ages?

Carlin Meyer
Palenville, N.Y.
The author is professor emerita at New York Regulation College.