Whenever I read Film Comment magazine, as I’m doing now, I feel particularly stupid. First it is unlikely that I will see the new retrospective of whatever at Lincoln Center, and second, I rarely know the celebrated Turkish, Georgian or Finnish directors who apparently have been turning out masterpiece after masterpiece during the last decade, while I struggle to catch up with the episodes of Futurama that I’ve missed. This experience leads to melancholy thoughts regarding “film culture” and “netflix:” what happened to seeing films “publically”–now it is only consistently possible in New York City and in some rare other locations (say San Francisco/Berkely where they have a major Film Archive or Minneapolis which has the Walker Art Center) to see a movie in a well-designed theater or even to see a movie in a theater at all. do people really wish to stay at home so goddamm much? on one hand, the bizarre corporate cineplex where I have to sit through a fucking half hour of TV commercials now (and then, like a bad freshman essay, they summarize what you’ve just seen–“we’ve taken a sneak peak at the big screen update of “Green Acres” and talked with its star Colin Farrell…) and on the other, the stupefaction of “home” where you can safely piss yourself while you slog through all 13 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz. as peggy lee whispered to me during an amorous embrace, “baby, is that all there is?” To which I replied, “when the boundaries of public and private life are muddled, public life becomes the unsatisfactory adjunct of a private life that is nevertheless misshapen by “public” but inaccessible forces.” She slapped me and left with that cheap Sinatra-fake Jack Jones. I retaliated by copping a feel of Connie Francis, who had passed out over her most recent Gin Rickey.