I may be tempting fate here, but, as I mentioned last week, I have elected to introduce a new feature for the final weeks of the offseason called "Slow News Day Tuesday," which is a counterpart to Free Form Friday and a subset of Completely Unrelated. Here is how it works:
To kill time, I’m going to bring up a topic having nothing directly to do with intercollegiate athletics, and we’ll discuss it in the comments. I mean, we pretty much do that anyway---dis William Faulkner or the Oxford comma around these parts, and see what happens to you---but this is an attempt to do so a little more formally. What can I tell you, folks; the season is almost upon us, and we have to do what we have to do to get us through these last few weeks.
Since Free Form Friday sometimes has taken a cinematic turn, I thought we would look at movies this week. A friend of mine, Dr. Susan Satterfield Ryan, recently shared these thoughts about film:
The choice that viewers now have in movie viewing has had an impact on our sense of self, on the market, and our movie-viewing habits. . . .
Once I had movie choice, I began re-watching the influential movies of my past, and it was easy to see how movies affected my sense of self. . . .
In my lifetime, I have gone from being a passive receiver of whatever the industry wanted me to see, to programmer of my viewing, to maker of movies. It’s a cool time to be alive.
I would be interested to know if any of you reading this have ever watched a particular theme of movies. How have you controlled your movie exploration?
That seems like a good question with which to begin the conversation. How has the ready availability of movies influenced your viewing choices? What common attributes have been shared by the films toward which you have gravitated? What has the broader availability of movies taught you about yourself that you did not know when (or, for the younger crowd, would not have known if) your movie viewing was more restricted?
Discuss amongst yourselves; I have---all right, Dr. Ryan has---given you a topic. (By the way, if when some huge, horrible, season-derailing news breaks on a Tuesday, this feature will be discontinued immediately.)
Go ‘Dawgs!